Mandatory Abortion Training for Residents

In 1994, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) declared a mandate that all Ob-Gyn Residency training programs must provide training in induced abortion. Failure to comply meant withdrawal of the accreditation of that training program—a devastating blow to any program. Individuals could opt out if they insisted. Hospital programs could not opt out: If hospitals (e.g., religious institutions) did not have the abortion training program on site, they must have arrangements for abortion training off site. This proabortion training mandate was to go into effect on January 1, l996. Since the ACGME was, and is, an independent authority answerable to no one, there was no way for AAPLOG to effectively object to this mandate. Unfair and unnecessary tho it may have been, it was the “law of the Medes and Persians” for medical training facilities. AAPLOG appealed to the US Government for help (one government role is to protect the people’s rights). The House Committee on Educational Oversight called a hearing for testimony from both sides. The result of these hearings was the Hoekstra-Coats Medical Training Nondiscrimination Act of 1995, which declared that, an entity that forced individuals or programs to participate in abortions would be discriminatory, and on that basis that entity would lose federal funding. Money talks. The ACGME Mandate was never enforced, although it is still on the books. That was then. Now is now. With the new thinking in Washington, D.C., AAPLOG expects this issue to become prominent again. Witness the January 2009 ACOG Committee on Healthcare for Underserved Women Opinion #424: “ACOG supports the availability of comprehensive reproductive health services for all women, and specifically supports…education about family planning and abortion as an integrated component of the obgyn residency training.” Same message as the 1994 ACGME Mandate. If (when) the new government nullifies the Medical Training Nondiscrimination Act of 1994, we will once again face a crisis. The following links provide the historical documentation of AAPLOG’s 1994-95 encounter with the ACGME Mandate, and the Federal law that neutralized the Mandate. Proposed Revisions – October 1993 AAPLOG Position 05-11-1994 ACGME Press Release 02-15-95 ACGME Press Release Clarification 02-16-95 Write to ACGME 02-22-95 ACGME to Hoekstra 08-02-95 Hoekstra-Coats 1995 Legislation Approved 04-25-1996