Abortion and Contraception in Medical School Curricula: A Survey of North American Family Medicine Clinical Curriculum Directors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Contraception and abortion care are commonly accessed health services, and physicians in training will encounter patients seeking this care. Curricula that teach contraception and abortion provision during medical school equip medical students with valuable skills and may influence their intention to provide these services during their careers. Family planning is nevertheless understood to be underrepresented in most medical curricula, including in North American medical schools where the laws on providing contraception and abortion have been consequentially changing. This study investigated the prevalence and predictors of contraception and abortion education in North American medical curricula in 2021. We asked family medicine clerkship directors from Canada and the United States (US) to report about contraception and abortion teaching in their clinical curricula and their school's whole curriculum and to report on associated factors. Survey questions were included in the 2021 Council of Academic Family Medicine's Educational Research Alliance (CERA) survey of Family Medicine Clerkship Directors at accredited North American medical schools. Surveys were distributed between April 29 and May 28, 2021, to the 160 clerkship directors listed in the CERA organization database. Seventy-eight directors responded to the survey (78/160, 48%). 47% of responding directors reported no contraception teaching in the family medicine clerkship. 81.7% of responding directors reported no abortion teaching in the clerkship, and 66% indicated abortion was not being taught in their school's whole curriculum. Medical school region correlated with the presence of abortion curricula, and schools with high graduation rates into the family medicine specialty reported abortion teaching more frequently. Fewer than 40% of responding directors had received training on both contraception and abortion care themselves. Contraception and abortion are both underrepresented in North American medical curricula. Formal abortion education may be absent from most family medicine clerkships and whole program curricula. To enhance family planning teaching in North American medical schools, we recommend that national curriculum resources be revised to include specific contraception and abortion learning objectives and for increased development and support for clinical curricula directors to universally include family planning teaching in whole program and family medicine clerkship curricula.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.040 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".