(HALIFAX) Kate Greenaway is the Canadian director of Medical Students for Choice, a group of 7000 medical students across the United States and Canada working towards improving school curriculums to include reproductive health training, especially abortion training.

Greenaway was interviewed in Halifax, the day before she left to spend the latter half of her summer — what should be her time away from studying and interning — learning how to perform an entirely common procedure not covered by her medical student curriculum: abortion.

What is new on the choice front in Canada?

All trials working towards legalizing mifepristone (RU 486) for abortions have stopped here, placing us way behind. The U.S. legalized mifepristone years ago. I think the best news we have right now is the acceptance of emergency contraception in Canada as a back up for birth control. Most doctors are willing to prescribe this method of pregnancy prevention, and we are looking towards having it available over the counter as well.

Is the right to abortion in jeopardy or is the issue access?

It is not the legality that is at risk; it’s the availability of services. In many cases, our medical schools and hospitals are not offering abortion training for future physicians. This will make the legal right to abortion meaningless, as there will be no providers.

This is the real problem that I see facing Canadian women at this time. Women in rural areas may have difficulty finding a pro-choice doctor, let alone a provider. The shortage of trained providers and/or facilities that will perform abortions results in women having to travel long distances to obtain care. Often, a woman will have to pay to obtain services once she has travelled, since some provinces won’t allow billing for abortion services.

Women often discover that their family physicians are pro-life and won’t refer them to the appropriate doctors.

Isn’t a doctor obligated to refer a patient for an abortion if she wants one?

The simple answer is yes, but there are ways around it. The Canadian Medical Association has a policy that if a doctor has an objection to counselling and referring women for an abortion s/he has to inform the patient and send her to someone who will make the referral. So doctors have to at least tell women what their options are. Some doctors trick their patients though. Some will say that abortion is not legal, or that they have referred them for an abortion when in fact their files have been hidden.

If medical students are not being trained in this area, how do you become an abortion provider?

I’m still working on that. The skills of medical providers are often learned through apprenticing, so the idea would be to find someone to teach us the techniques. Currently, we have to seek this out ourselves because it is not included in our gynaecology rotations in undergraduate medicine.

Medical Students for Choice has developed a program of a month-long internship for medical students in the U.S. and Canada who want to learn abortion techniques. This program matches up interested students with physicians who are willing to teach. This is the first step for us in becoming providers. From there, we can continue our training by seeking out pro-choice residencies.

How has Medical Students for Choice made a difference?

Until this group was formed ten years ago, there were almost no medical schools in North America offering abortion training. This is changing through the work of the group, as each campus group challenges its own administration to include women’s health in the curriculum. Medical Students for Choice has shown me that there are a number of activists out there who are determined to keep women’s reproductive freedom a top priority. It is very inspiring!