Medical Students Now Learning How To Perform Abortions On Fruit

LISTEN TO TLR’S LATEST PODCAST:

Grace Carr

A nonprofit hosted a Philadelphia workshop in early December that showed medical students how to abort unborn babies, using papayas to mimic a woman’s uterus.

Sixty medical students interested in learning how to perform abortions with minimal equipment gathered at the workshop, using only rudimental instruments on the cervix-like fruits to mimic performing abortion procedures on actual women, according to the Guardian.

The workshop was part of a larger conference hosted by the nonprofit Medical Students For Choice (MSFC), a family planning and abortion advocacy group, which attracted 450 students from the U.S. and Canada. The group works to ensure that all medical students have access to abortion education and training, according to its website.

“The community is very anti-choice. When it comes to abortion, there’s no education at my school. You have to seek it out and that’s a travesty,” said Cheyenne Mangold, a third year student at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center who attended the workshop. She is also a member of MSFC.

Oregonian instructor Marta Rowh taught two of the fruity abortion workshops, explaining that no advanced technology or even electricity would be required to perform abortions for women. “These are designed to be used in a hut in rural Zambia with no electricity if necessary,” Rowh said, describing the “stealth kits” used largely in African countries so that the government remains unaware of women having abortions.

“I can visualize it even though it’s just a fruit,” said Oyebola Oyewolea, a 24-year-old student at Atlanta Morehouse School of Medicine. “I’m hoping to become a pediatrician but I want to be able to provide this service if a teen needed it and can’t get it anywhere else,”she added. She said she would even be willing to perform illegal abortions and risking prison for women in need. Multiple other students told the Guardian they would be willing to perform “back alley” abortions to help women who didn’t want to have children.

“In medicine there’s a tendency to dark humor. It’s intense, so you have to joke about it sometimes,” said another workshop instructor and abortion doctor, Andrea Chiavarini. “These are life savers,” she added, describing the abortion tools.

Roughly 54 percent of women said that their lives post-aborting aren’t better after they aborted, according to a new study published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. About 60 percent of the women said they had abortions to make others happy, 75 percent said there was pressure from others to abort, and 30 percent aborted out of fear of losing their partner if they kept the child. Roughly 65 percent also said they knew aborting was a mistake.

Follow Grace on Twitter.

WATCH TLR’S LATEST VIDEO: