Shortly after the United States Supreme Court issued its Roe v. Wade Following the abortion ruling in 1973, Laura Esserman 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, when 14 states prohibit abortion in almost all circumstances, the breast cancer surgeon at the University of California-San Francisco 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 headlined frequently for 34 years.
“People are passing laws that regulate what should be a medical decision,” he said. “And I oppose it in every way I can.”
Esserman and other doctors have urged their colleagues and medical societies to move all professional meetings out of states that criminalize abortion. In the absence of taking action, they have called for a boycott of the events.
In November, Esserman hopes 300 health providers and researchers will gather in San Francisco for an alternative breast cancer conference.
The effort to move the annual conferences, which generate substantial revenue to local communities and attract many of the country’s 1.1 million physicians and other medical professionals seeking to network, satisfy continuing education requirements and learn about the latest advances in their fields, has led to some notable transfers.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists moved its 2023 annual meeting and approximately 4,000 participants from New Orleans to Maryland in response to Louisiana’s abortion ban. An estimated 3,600 health professionals attended the American Association of Immunologists conference in Chicago this year, 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 on how to express their disagreement. Some argue that it is more important than ever to visit states where abortion has been banned, to learn about the problems that arise because of the laws and to help people organize against them.
“We cannot support criminalizing communities already harmed by this legislation,” said OB-GYN Jamila Perritt, president and CEO of Physicians for Reproductive Health. “Instead of withdrawing support, what we’re asking for is actually flooding those people with support.”
Physicians for Reproductive Health has been providing security to doctors attacked by anti-abortion activists, Perritt said, and training doctors to teach abortion care in states that restrict abortion and to testify before state legislatures about the need for abortion access. .
“There is a lot to be gained by coming to these states, supporting us, seeing the reality and bringing these conversations to their conference space so they can better understand our reality, rather than just boycotting that state entirely, which is not helpful. ”said Bhavik Kumar, medical director of Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio and medical director of Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast in Texas and Louisiana.
Since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe and eliminate the federal constitutional right to abortion, all but nine states and Washington, D.C., have imposed restrictions on abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
The San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium continues to be held in Texas, where abortion is banned in almost all cases and calls for a boycott do not appear to have dampened participation. In fact, the number of in-person attendees increased from just under 8,000 in 2019 to 8,220 last year, organizers said.
Breast oncologist Virginia Kaklamani, a professor of medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and co-director of the San Antonio symposium, plans to stay in Texas. She doesn’t believe in boycotts, although she shares the concerns of those who propose them. Despite exceptions, such as the Pro-Life American Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, doctors have generally 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 will not help,” Kaklamani said. “You stay and fight for your patients.”
Esserman acknowledges that the calls for a boycott have not had a significant impact, but she feels compelled to keep up the pressure anyway.
He can’t help but think of a patient who recently came to his office in San Francisco nine weeks pregnant with aggressive breast cancer. If you continued with the pregnancy, you would not be eligible to receive the most effective treatment. “Where I live, she has a choice,” Esserman said. In some states, you would have no choice but to carry the pregnancy to term.
Cary Gross, a professor at Yale School of Medicine and co-author of a JAMA Internal Medicine op-ed last year advocating for boycotts, cited three arguments: expressing the values of the profession, acting as an ethical consumer and protecting health. of the attendees. Female doctors of childbearing age have expressed fear of traveling to anti-abortion states, especially during pregnancy.
“Legislators who pass these laws probably won’t change their position,” Gross said. “But for the general population, the more you can do to alert people, to remind them that there is another way, the more you should make your voice heard.”
Still, Gross, Esserman and others pushing boycotts can point to no evidence that their efforts have changed hearts and minds, much less laws.
Instead of moving the 2022 meeting of the American Society of Hematology out of New Orleans after Louisiana imposed a trigger law to ban abortion, Jane Winter, the society’s president at the time, met with Louisiana’s then-governor , John Bel Edwards, and talked to him about women. whose survival could depend on aborting. They talked about their 22-year-old patient who had Hodgkin lymphoma and learned she was pregnant just before a planned 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 our patients’ care,” Winters wrote in a column for The Hematologist.
Last year, hematologists met in San Diego and will meet again in California, which has no postgraduate degree.Roe restrictions on abortion, in December.
In an email, Winter said her conversation with Edwards didn’t change anything concrete, as far as she knows. But he added, “I think telling the stories of specific people (in my case, my patients) is a way to start changing minds.”
This article was produced by KFF Health Newswho publishes California Healthlinean editorially independent service California Health Care Foundation.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism on health issues and is one of the core operating programs of KFF, an independent source of research, polling and health policy journalism. Learn more about KFF.
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