AMSA’s Reproductive Health Mentorship Sprint Program is designed to pair interested mentors and mentees for a structured 4-week mentorship experience to discuss and explore:
- Reproductive Justice
- Gender and racial justice in sexual/reproductive healthcare and primary care
- Preparing for residency and ensuring access to training in family planning and abortion care
- Career opportunities for clinical practice focused on family planning, abortion care, and primary care
- The effects of public policy on reproductive healthcare
- Work-life balance as physician, addressing moral injury, and mitigating risk of personal harm as an abortion provider
- Health advocacy as a physician-activist
- Research interests in reproductive health(care), rights, and justice
Eligible applicants will be paired by their indication of interest in the above topics and a few other factors. We’ll match you with a mentor/mentee with similar interests, and we’ll provide resources to guide you through four mentoring sessions, one per week as explained further below.
Why does Reproductive Health Mentorship matter?
Tomorrow’s physicians are looking for the training and knowledge to completely care for their patients’ sexual and reproductive health needs and experiences.
Medical students who envision becoming trained in sexual and reproductive healthcare (SRH), family planning, and abortion care often don’t know what settings are available to practice in, what factors exist in the U.S. today surrounding SRH, or what life is like as an abortion provider in the context of choosing a specialty and career path.
On the other hand, the network of physicians who provide SRH, family planning, and abortion care is relatively small, and fairly close-knit. And clinicians with these experiences are often eager for the chance to share their knowledge and equip future physicians to enter the field.
Through this mentorship program, our intention is to provide a protected space-time for medical students to engage with practicing physicians, researchers, community organizers, and leaders from within the movement for reproductive freedom and justice. We seek to provide the fertile ground for the seeds of new relationships, connections, insights, meaning-making, and organizing for action. We are committed to this mentorship program as a positive contribution toward an intersectional feminist revolution in the House of Medicine, which is the necessary and long-overdue correction to the modern profession’s foundation in white supremacist cis-heteropatriarchy.
We hope that this program will be one step towards creating better outcomes for patients in need of complete, accessible, and justice-centered sexual and reproductive healthcare, through strengthening our community.
