Written by Jeff Koetje, MD, AMSA Reproductive Health Programming Strategist
ReSTORYing Community: Co-creating a New Narrative for Our Chosen Profession
At AMSA we believe reproductive health services are essential to comprehensive health care, and that abortion services are a vital component of reproductive health care. We know physicians who provide abortion care are essential to our communities; and believe their practice should be legally protected and available to all in need, regardless of how much they earn, who they work for, or what state they live in.
Over the last many years state legislators and The Supreme Court, have shared purpose with anti-choice and religious extremists to put this vital health care out of reach for patients in need in nearly half of the states around the country. Their united actions have caused havoc in the practices and lives of physician colleagues, at residency programs, and medical schools across the country.
However, on Election Day, young people and voters stood up and said stop! We do not share your vision for our health care or our nation – we reject the stories you’d been trying to sell us and we are uniting to write a new story for our country and our futures!
In the profession of medicine, and specifically, in the context of medical education and training, there are lots of stories that get told, and so many that don’t. The ones we don’t tell – or, to put it another way, the ones that we do tell, but not out-loud – are the stories that form what many in medical education call the hidden curriculum.
The hidden curriculum is such an interesting turn-of-phrase in the context of medical education and training – we’ve actually given a name to (told a story about) something that is supposed to stay hidden, stay not noticed, stay not named?
All medical and premedical students have experienced the hidden curriculum even if they aren’t or weren’t aware of it. The hidden curriculum is the set of stories that are not told, but still powerfully conveyed in ways that literally shape students’ and trainees’ experiences in the space-time (that is, in the “reality”) of medical education and training. The hidden curriculum – even if never spoken – is a channel for forces and dynamics that construct a certain and specific reality that impacts the “culture of medical education and practice.”
Today’s medical students and trainees are caught up in a country of changing laws and a context of unrecognized and unaddressed trauma perpetuated by the hidden curriculum. The AMSA Reproductive Health Project programs are places where we are working to recognize the hidden curriculum and break the cycle of trauma all too many are experiencing. We acknowledge the truth in the words of Resmaa Menakem
“Trauma decontextualized in a person over time can look like personality, Trauma decontextualized in a family over time can look like family traits.
Trauma decontextualized in a people over time can look like culture.” [Emphasis added.]
Through the activities of the AMSA Reproductive Health Project, we seek to confront the hidden curriculum directly in an attempt to disrupt it. We are committed to standing with and standing up for students, trainees and physicians. We seek to support cycle-breaking, so that a new paradigm of relationality can emerge – one in which we within the profession of medicine practice an ethics of care for each other; one in which we can be more fully human with and for each other.
By telling the stories that have been suppressed and repressed, we can help each other more clearly perceive the many ways in which we have been conditioned to accept – and conditioned to perpetuate – a culture of harm which transmits trauma from one generation of physicians to the next. By telling stories that offer a counter narrative to the norms of our profession’s culture, we can help re-story ourselves, and thereby re-shape our minds and mindsets, and through transformative actions, we can create a new reality within which we can create and experience deep, intergenerational healing.
The AMSA Reproductive Health Mentorship Sprint Program is one “place” where we come together – physicians and future physicians – to create and share new stories about ourselves and our profession. Together we can build a better for ourselves, our patients, and our communities.
If you are interested in abortion care, family planning, and sexual and reproductive healthcare check out our mentorship program! Over the month of December, you’ll have an opportunity to sign up for our Winter Sprint that starts mid-January. Offered every season, this 4-week experience of mentoring and relationship-building is designed to strengthen and deepen your connections to the community of abortion providers throughout this country.
Join us in co-creating a new narrative for our chosen profession. Become part of a new generation of story-tellers, a new generation of caring professionals who are helping to heal our profession and our nation!
