In a time of increasing debate between pro-life and pro-choice advocates, resident students continue to learn abortion procedures. However, these procedures are used not only for elective abortions, but for other medical reasons.

Although it is up to each resident student to decide if he or she will perform abortions, teaching the abortion procedure will never be outlawed because of the procedure's other medical uses.

"No individual should be forced to perform a procedure they feel is morally incorrect," said Dr. Lamar Ekbladh, chairman of Hershey's department of obstetrics and gynecology.

All resident students are taught to do a procedure called suction curettage or dilation and curettage as part of their general medical training, Ekbladh said. It is important, he said, to distinguish this type of "abortion" from an elective abortion.

"Abortion is a term for any early pregnancy loss," Ekbladh said. "The procedure can be taught in cases where it is not an elective abortion." Although the procedure resident students learn can be used to do an elective abortion, it is also used for other medical procedures, Ekbladh said. For example, he said, some women have a missed abortion, which means they develop an amniotic sac, but no fetus. The woman may then opt to have her uterus cleaned out using the same method used in elective abortion.

When these situations arise, it is the patient's decision to either have this procedure performed or continue the pregnancy and wait to miscarry. Most women would rather not continue the pregnancy, he said, although one decision is not safer than the other.

"The line is very distinct," he said.

Other situations arise when the mother's life is at risk from the pregnancy, he said. For example, she could have had a heart or kidney transplant at one time, or she could suffer from severe cardiac defects that make it very difficult to carry a pregnancy to term, he said.

The student should be competent enough to perform a first-trimester abortion by the end of the first or second year of residency, he said.

"By the end of four years we need to feel confident that the student can practice without direct supervision," Ekbladh said, although he emphasized that residents are not required to perform the procedure in an abortion capacity. For example, they may elect to perform it only to clean out a uterus after a missed abortion or incomplete pregnancy.

Student Marion Siegfried (senior-biology) said medical students concentrating in obstetrics and gynecology should be the only students who learn the abortion procedures.

"There is no need for someone in neurosurgery to learn (to perform abortions)," said Siegfried, who plans to go to medical school.

If a student concentrating in obstetrics and gynecology prefers not to perform abortions, then that student should not have to, she said. But there is no harm, she said, for those students to know the procedure even if they never need to use it.

Greg Feero (senior-molecular and cell biology), who is also planning to go to medical school, said, "I kind of take the opinion that if (a student) is not in obstetrics and gynecology, it's not imperative (to learn the procedures)."

But a physician in obstetrics and gynecology should know how to perform the procedure because of life-threatening procedures that make it necessary, he said.

Ekbladh said medical students do not decide which area of medicine they will specialize in until after medical school.