This close to Nov. 5, we are being battered with promises that this race will determine the future of the country.
But Christine Dehlendorf wants people to remember that as important as Election Day is, it won’t be the end of discussions about reproductive health. “No matter what happens next Tuesday … our friends, our families, our children, [and] next generations to come are going to have to be struggling with whether or not they have the right to make decisions about their bodies and control their reproduction,” she said.
Dehlendorf is a family physician and professor of family and community medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and directs the Person-Centered Reproductive Health Program. Recently, she co-authored a First Opinion arguing that primary care providers and family physicians should have more training in providing abortion care.
On this episode of the “First Opinion Podcast,” I spoke with her about the op-ed, performing abortions as a family physician, and what she thinks about the way abortion is coming up on the 2024 campaign trail.
Abortion “is in reality no different from, or more complicated than, a lot of the other things that we do in health care,” she said. And when abortion is just another part of health care, that changes things for patients and providers alike.
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