“The mentorship in OBGYN is huge.
We have to depend on each other; we cannot do this alone.”
The following story extract is from a conversation with an OBGYN mentor and mentee.
Mentor: I was pretty upset. Our practice doesn’t do elective abortions, but we care for anyone who’s had a complication after one, without judgment. In practice, there are times when a woman needs an elective abortion. We’ve had patients say, “This pregnancy was unplanned. I can’t do it right now.” We still walk beside them. The trigger laws in Idaho were written so poorly that all medically necessary things, like completing an inevitable abortion or treating an ectopic pregnancy, initially required a waiver. That was nuts. We still take care of complicated pregnancies, which frequently don’t survive. It ties our hands. We can’t practice standard-of-care medicine, and people get hurt.
Mentee:I initially felt like this is COVID 2.0. COVID specifically for OBGYNs or women’s healthcare providers because it was all about the words that you use. And at first during COVID, our group had nightly calls with each other about how our business was going to survive, and how we're going to figure this out medically. So honestly, Dobbs kind of felt like the same, except it’s abortion instead of COVID. Should we make our whole staff mask? Should we make our whole staff get vaccinated? Those sorts of hard questions—which we all actually were mostly on the same page for, but not completely. So when one of our partners would say, ‘we don't do abortions,’ then some of us would be like, but actually we do, we just haven't been using that same word. So we all did eventually get on the same page, but I don’t think I really understood what it all meant for a while.
The other day I was at a talk about Roe v. Wade and when that happened, it was such a huge change in the healthcare that was available for women—it was almost as good as antibiotics. But I'm so much further away from that kind of advancement in medical care, so maybe that’s why it hit you first. You weren't practicing before Roe v. Wade, but maybe it was a little closer, or some of your attendings could still talk about it. For me, we’ve had Roe for the last 50 years, so it scares me to death to think about taking care of a woman who may come in after a self-abortion—I was not trained to do that at all. So when I was shocked to hear you were leaving, I was also realizing whoa, this is really serious. And now I feel like yeah, I totally get it.
Mentor:And the way they made the decision—the right to abortion was all based on privacy, right? And I can't think of anything more private than sex, right? But now what you do in the privacy of your own bedroom and privacy of your own house, sometimes there's privacy, but actually the states can decide whether it's private or not. It's just... just a really, really crappy way to make a decision.
