AMSA Elective in Abortion Care, Family Planning & Reproductive Justice (non-clinical)
FALL 2024 & WINTER 2025
1 credit P/F Electives – Seats Limited –
A virtual, credit-bearing elective for US and international medical students (all years), residents, fellows, and graduate public health students who are passionately interested in developing and deepening their knowledge and skills in abortion care, family planning, and reproductive justice.
Fall 2024 Elective: Monday, September 23 – Friday, October 4, 2024
Winter 2025 Elective: Monday, January 20 – Friday, January 31, 2025
All sessions will be held from
11:00am – 1:00pm ET via Zoom
No in-person components, this elective is conducted fully online,
and may be taken for credit, or audited (not for credit).
Program Description:
Developed in partnership between theand the, this virtual elective for U.S. and international medical students (in particular, medical students pursuing family medicine or ob/gyn) will center Reproductive Justice (RJ) as a human-rights framework for exploring topics related to reproductive health and abortion care, including approaches to RJ-informed and trauma-informed patient care. The course will present reproductive health education with a focus on the interconnections of power, privilege, oppression, and resistance. Students will engage with critical social theories – including Critical Race Theory, Intersectional Feminism, and Queer Theory – to explore, interrogate, and reflect on the complex sociocultural, medico-legal, and politico-economic context of sexual and reproductive health.
The program is grounded in a pedagogy of liberatory education (Paulo Freire; bell hooks), and in a commitment to practicing an ethics of Love-centered educational care for adult learners that help us create and sustain deeper relationships within intentional communities.
This course will cover healthcare delivery including family planning and abortion care in a post-Roe reality. Even though this is a non-clinical elective, we will significantly incorporate approaches to patient care that are loving and affirmative of the universal human right to bodily autonomy, agency, and dignity, with a focus on correcting and repairing medicine’s ethical failures to honor the bodily autonomy, agency, and dignity of women and femme people generally, and especially Indigenous and Black women, and queer and trans people.
AMSA Reproductive Health Institute 2023
We are excited to share we’ve designed a new format that features monthly live and on-demand sessions, advocacy & clinical skills-building, one-on-one mentoring and coaching, along with on-site special networking and action opportunities at .
Applications are now closed
Check out our post in AMSA ON CALL:
Calling Repro Freedom Dreamers & Doers!
The “WHY”
The late civil rights activist, Toni Cade Bambara, once said, “The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” At a time when authoritarian and fascist movements in the US are organizing to reverse more than 60 years of gains in human and civil rights, we – those of us on the side of freedom, truth, and beauty – must present a compelling and irresistible vision for collective liberation, freedom, and flourishing. Too often, the side of freedom fails to convey what we are actually for, because we speak so frequently about what we are against. But merely speaking against things does not a movement make! At least, not one that is grounded in joyful community, embodied connection, and deep resolve to keep fighting for what is right and good.
This year’s Abortion Care & Reproductive Health Institute will help future physicians lead with positive values that point to a better world for us all. The Institute will be an exploration of what it means to say that “hope is not a feeling, it is a discipline” in light of the very serious and harmful attacks against reproductive health, rights, and justice that we are experiencing in the US — including the egregious reversal of the constitutional protection to the right to abortion care. For as much as it is necessary to boldly step up and say “No!” to these ongoing attacks, it is equally necessary that we tell and embody a counternarrative that invites and draws people into the vital and creative work of building the world we actually dream of.
So, if you are a future physician who is also a Reproductive Freedom Dreamer and Doer, this Institute might be for you!
READ MORE…