MSFC members making their voice heard in Washington, DC in March despite the weather!

I’m angry. But more than that, I’m worried. I’m worried and I’m deeply disturbed by the recent, ongoing war on women and our access to healthcare. We’ve watched for the past several years as locality after locality, state after state, and now the Supreme Court of the United States, steadily turn back the clock on decades of hard-won legislative and legal precedents that expanded our rights to health care and our reproductive freedom. What can we do in the face of such injustice?

Last spring, the Supreme Court heard the case Hobby Lobby v. Sibelius. As you may know, several hundred concerned citizens gathered at the Supreme Court to protest against Hobby Lobby and their ludicrous assertion that, (I’m paraphrasing, here), the owners of corporations should be allowed to impose their religious beliefs upon all of their employees. In this particular case, the Hobby Lobby owners wanted, (and were recently granted), legal authority to deny their female employees access to health insurance coverage for birth control.

So, on March 25, I stood on the wet, snowy steps of the Supreme Court with several of my medical school classmates representing Medical Students For Choice. I think that protesting at the Supreme Court has a negligible effect on the outcome of cases, but I went because, as an American woman, I wanted to stand with like-minded citizens to say, “This is wrong. My healthcare is #notmybossbusiness. Medical decisions belong in the clinic, between a doctor and her patient. We are appalled and we want the world to know it.” I went because, as a medical student and future doctor, I want my patients to know that I’ve got their backs. I want patients to know that I will use my position of relative influence to advocate for them in all their healthcare needs. I want them to know that I will fight for their right to take birth control pills, or get an implant or an IUD, or an abortion.

I went into medicine because I wanted to help people. I think that is why most doctors go into medicine. In medical school, though we learn to be compassionate and competent providers of patient care, little emphasis is placed on the larger position we should all assume in our communities and our country. I believe that physicians have a unique role to play in the larger fight for healthcare access. We have unique, first-hand experience with patients’ struggles for access, and our privileged position of relative power obligates us to take this fight and their stories out of the clinic and into the hallowed halls of political power.

I will never stop fighting for birth control. When I become a physician, and I sit down with a patient to say, “let’s talk about your needs and your concerns about your reproductive health,” I want her to be able to choose from all of the medically-sound options, because it really isn’t her boss’s business.

Written by Lillian, a MSFC Student Leader, here with her husband Chris.