Immediately following the US Supreme Court ruling Roe v. Wade Laura Esherman, who decided to have an abortion in 1973, used her high school graduation speech to urge her classmates to vote for the Equal Rights Amendment to expand women’s access to property, divorce and abortion .
Five decades later, with 14 states banning abortion in nearly all circumstances, the UC San Francisco breast cancer surgeon has once again taken up the fight for women’s reproductive rights. Since 2021, when Texas banned most abortions, she has boycotted the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium — a conference she had attended regularly, and often made headlines, for 34 years.
“People are passing laws that legislate what should be a medical decision,” he said. “And I counter in any way I can.”
Esherman and other doctors urged their colleagues and medical societies to move all professional meetings out of states that criminalize abortion. Without a move, they have called for a boycott of the events.
In November, Esherman expects 300 health providers and researchers to meet in San Francisco for an alternative breast cancer conference.
The effort to move the annual conferences — which generate significant revenue for local communities and attract many of the nation’s 1.1 million physicians and other medical professionals who want to network, meet continuing education requirements and learn about latest developments in their fields – has led to notable moves.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists moved its annual meeting to 2023 and about 4,000 participants from New Orleans to Maryland in response to Louisiana’s abortion ban. An estimated 3,600 health professionals attended this year’s American Immunological Association conference in Chicago after the group moved the meeting from its planned location in Phoenix in response to Arizona’s restrictive abortion law.
“In addition to causing great physical and psychological harm to patients,” the association said in a statement, abortion bans “threaten irreparable damage to the private and trusting relationship between medical professionals and their patients.”
However, even doctors who agree on reproductive rights disagree about how to express the disagreement. Some argue that it’s more important than ever to visit states where abortion is banned, learn about the issues that arise because of the laws, and help people organize against them.
“We cannot support penalizing communities that are already harmed by this legislation,” said obstetrician and gynecologist Jamila Perritt, president and CEO of Physicians for Reproductive Health. “As opposed to withdrawing support, what we’re asking is to flood these people with support.”
Physicians for Reproductive Health provides cover for doctors targeted by anti-abortion activists, Perritt said, and trains doctors to teach abortion care in states that restrict abortion and testify to state legislatures about the need for access to abortion. abortions.
“There’s a lot to be gained by coming to these states, supporting us, seeing the reality and bringing these conversations to your conference space so you can better understand our reality, instead of just boycotting completely this state, which is not helpful,” said Bhavik Kumar, chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio and medical director for Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast in Texas and Louisiana.
Since the Supreme Court decision in 2022 to overturn Roe and eliminate a federal constitutional right to abortion, all but nine states and Washington, D.C., have imposed abortion restrictions, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
The San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium continues to take place in Texas, where abortion is banned in nearly all cases, and calls for a boycott don’t seem to have slowed attendance. In fact, the number of participants increased from just under 8,000 in 2019 to 8,220 last year, organizers said.
Breast oncologist Virginia Kaklamanis, a professor of medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center-San Antonio who is directing the San Antonio symposium, plans to stay in Texas. He does not believe in boycotts, although he shares the concerns of boycott supporters. Despite exceptions, such as the pro-life American Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, doctors have largely spoken out against abortion restrictions.
“I think the way to handle it is to talk to our elected officials, get out and vote. Moving meetings from one place to another is not going to help,” Kaklamanis said. “You stay and fight for your patients.”
Esherman acknowledges that calls for boycotts haven’t had much of an impact, but she feels compelled to keep lobbying anyway.
She can’t help but think of a patient who recently came to her San Francisco office nine weeks pregnant and with aggressive breast cancer. If she continued the pregnancy, she would not be eligible for the most effective treatment. “Where I live, he has a choice,” Esherman said. In some states, she would have no choice but to terminate the pregnancy.
Cary Gross, a Yale School of Medicine professor who wrote an opinion piece in JAMA Internal Medicine last year supporting the boycotts, cited three arguments: expressing the profession’s values, acting as an ethical consumer and protecting the health of participants. . Female doctors of childbearing age have expressed fears about traveling to anti-abortion states, especially during pregnancy.
“The legislators who pass these laws probably aren’t going to change their stance,” Gross said. “But for the general population, the more you can do to alert people, to remind people that there is another way, you have to make your voice heard.”
Yet Gross, Esherman and others pushing for boycotts cannot indicate that their efforts have changed hearts and minds, let alone laws.
Instead of moving the 2022 meeting of the American Society of Hematology from New Orleans after Louisiana passed a triggering law banning abortion, Jane Winter, then the society’s president, met with then-Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards and told him about women. whose survival may depend on abortion. They talked about her 22-year-old patient who had Hodgkin’s lymphoma and learned she was pregnant shortly before a scheduled stem cell transplant.
“Governor Edwards was visibly moved by our clinical cases and shared that lawmakers had not considered the impact of abortion restrictions on the care of our patients,” Winters wrote in a column for the Hematologist.
Last year, hematologists held their meeting in San Diego and will meet again in California, which has no meta-Roe restrictions on abortion, in December.
In an email, Winter said her conversation with Edwards didn’t change anything in particular, as far as she knows. But he added, “I think telling the stories of specific individuals—in my case, those of my patients—is a way to begin to change minds.”
This article was produced by KFF Health News, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.
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This article was reprinted by khn.orga national newsroom that produces in-depth health journalism and is one of the core operating programs at KFF – the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.
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