Meet the Medical Students for Choice By Kathryn Joyce IN AN ERA OF TRAP LAWS, MISLEADING HIDDEN CAMERA campaigns and ongoing vigilante violence against abortion clinics and staff, it’s easy to wonder why any young doctor would want to become an abortion provider. The battles only seem to grow—from ever more restrictive state laws to the recent jailing of women on “feticide” charges—and providers perpetually stand on both the figurative and literal front lines. For years, this landscape has led to a bigger, more existential concern: that the generation of abortion providers who were radicalized by the horrors of back alley abortions and the siege mentality of opponents was ag ing out of t heir call i ng, a nd not enough new doctors were willing to take their place. Who, after all, would want to spend 10 years training in medicine only to graduate to a career filled with workplace protests, harassment of their clients and families and the chilling threat of an assassin’s bullet? As early as 1992, providers and repro-ductive rights advocacy organizations began to warn about “the graying of the abortion provider.” But in recent years, that trend has begun to turn around, K AT H R Y N J O Y C E is a journalist and author of The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption and Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement. thanks largely to the organization Med-ical Students for Choice (MSFC) , which was founded in 1993 to help support a new generation of abortion providers. Since then, the group has worked with some 10,000 members, supplementing the poor family planning curricula in some medical schools, creating a sup-portive community to discuss values and steering students towards abor-tion-friendly residency programs. But each member of MSFC still faces a deeply personal choice in deciding to become a provider—a sort of “Road to Damas-cus” moment of deciding to sacrifice personal comfort and professional stability for the sake of broader repro-ductive freedom. We spoke to four young doctors and medical students about their own moment of decision and found in their responses an inspiring glimpse of the generation of providers to come. brought her training to her hometown and was able to provide IUDs to many young women. Cait Goss, 31, of Albuquerque, New Mexico , C AIT GOSS GREW UP ALL OVER LATIN America. Both her parents and grandparents were Peace Corps volunteers—it was “a family that really believes in service and giving back,” she says—and by her early teens, she’d already lived in five different countries. When Goss was 14, the family moved back to the United States to a small town in rural southern New Mexico that, at the time, had one of the highest teen preg-nancy rates in the country. Although New Mexico has strong protections for abor-tion rights, most of the providers and clinics were in Albuquerque, many hours 20 CONSCIENC E
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