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
Registration Closed
Winter 2025 Elective: Monday, January 20 – Friday, January 31, 2025
All sessions will be held from
1:00pm – 3:00pm 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 the AMSA Reproductive Health Project and the RJ Med Ed Project of the University of Michigan Medical School, 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.