Advocates, medical college students, religion leaders and physicians got here collectively earlier this month in Bowling Greens, Ky., to mark the two-year anniversary of the Kentucky Court docket of Appeals resolution that allowed one of many nation’s most draconian state abortion bans to take impact. The near-total ban in Kentucky has no exception for abortion care in instances of incest or rape.
With a cell billboard truck studying “Kentucky’s Abortion Ban Is Driving Away Docs” as a backdrop, the Bowling Greens press convention highlighted the devastating implications of Kentucky’s abortion ban—chief amongst them its energy to drive docs away.
KY lawmakers have taken away our freedom to make private well being selections. Their intrusive coverage selections actively put our well being & our futures in peril.
It’s as much as our technology to take our rights again.
Learn the way we’re preventing again: https://t.co/Od5n7GH7hy pic.twitter.com/sbSWQcolN4
— KY Reproductive Freedom Fund (@KY_RFF) July 26, 2024
In a latest interview with Ms., Lilly Delijoo, College of Louisville medical pupil, chapter president of Medical College students for Alternative and speaker on the press convention stated, “It’s a quite common thought course of” amongst her friends in medical college “that possibly we don’t wish to keep within the state after we know we worry getting the right coaching that we want to have the ability to handle our sufferers sooner or later.”
This press convention was half of a bigger marketing campaign unveiled this summer time on the two-year anniversary of the fall of Roe and sought to name consideration to the devastating results of Kentucky’s abortion ban.
Alongside the marketing campaign’s launch in June, college students on the College of Louisville carried out and launched a survey of medical college students in Kentucky, which discovered that almost all had been unlikely to observe within the state attributable to its antiabortion insurance policies.
This discovering isn’t a surprise: An identical research carried out by the American School of Obstetricians and Gynecologists discovered that almost 60 p.c of candidates stated they had been “unlikely to use for a residency in a state with abortion restrictions.”
States with abortion bans are already confronting these penalties. A 2023 research carried out by the Affiliation of American Medical schools discovered that “states with abortion bans noticed a bigger decline in medical college seniors making use of for residency in 2023 in contrast with states with out bans.”
Extra not too long ago, over 300 medical professionals got here collectively to oppose Kentucky’s near-total abortion ban. As Dr. Alecia Fields and Shriya Dodwani wrote in The Courier Journal, “Our collective voice underscores how these bans severely affect our means to offer important medical care to Kentuckians.”
The projected lack of medical college students and professionals within the state, coupled with an incapability for docs to offer important medical care, is an particularly horrifying prospect for Kentucky. Research present that greater than half of Kentucky’s 120 counties are with out an OB-GYN. Kentucky’s maternal and toddler mortality charges rank fortieth within the nation. The state’s extreme abortion ban solely exacerbates this disparity and additional prevents ladies from receiving essential reproductive healthcare.
A central aim of the newly introduced statewide marketing campaign is to lift consciousness round this challenge by highlighting how Kentucky’s antiabortion legal guidelines have made it “a much less fascinating place for medical professionals.”
The marketing campaign is spearheaded by the Kentucky Reproductive Freedom Fund (KYRFF), a philanthropic group established in 2018 in response to rising assaults on Kentucky ladies’s reproductive rights.
KYRFF was based by Ona Marshall and her husband, Dr. Ernest Marshall, an OB-GYN in Louisville, Ky. The Marshalls are the previous co-owners of EMW Ladies’s Surgical Middle, a Kentucky abortion clinic based in 1981. Earlier than the autumn of Roe, EMW was the solely unbiased abortion clinic in Kentucky for a few years and the one clinic to offer abortions after 13.6 weeks. EMW stopped offering abortion care as soon as Kentucky’s set off ban went into impact.
The informational marketing campaign consists of two cell billboard vans, to be seen in three Kentucky cities (Frankfort, Lexington and Bowling Inexperienced); 5 rural billboards; and a wide range of digital advertisements that urge Kentucky residents to signal a pledge calling for an finish to the state’s abortion ban.
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