UW accreditation would not be threatened by abortion law
Dear Capital Times Editor: UW Medical School Dean Robert Golden was quoted in an April 10 article regarding the impact of my proposed legislation to end the policy he created in 2008 of supplying state employees to serve as abortionists at Planned Parenthood within the scope of their employment at UW. In that article he insinuates that the UW’s ability to maintain ACGME accreditation would be impaired, but in his letter published April 14 he now claims that “Wisconsin will lose that accreditation.”
That is ridiculous.The state of Arizona has a statutory prohibition very similar to my bill which has been in place since 2011. Neither of Arizona’s state medical schools have lost their accreditation, despite the same sort of claims to that end as made by Dean Golden.
As another example, the U.S. military’s medical school operates under similar restrictions and has continuously maintained its accreditation — in fact, I have found no known cases of accreditation actually being lost or even formally threatened by ACGME anywhere as a result of a lack of abortion training, and there most certainly is no requirement by the ACGME that UW faculty in the course of their official duties be used to perform abortions, as is currently the case.
Even Dr. Doug Laube, board member for Physicians for Reproductive Choice and one of the UW doctors performing abortions at Planned Parenthood, admitted in a 2013 article for the Chronicle of Higher Education that in the U.S., “in the third year, when students make rounds with physicians, get hands-on training, and decide what kind of doctors they want to be, only a third of them get lectures on abortion,” lamenting that "slightly less than half are offered some sort of a clinical experience."
Thank you for the opportunity to correct Dean Golden’s blatant misrepresentation.