Findings from our annual survey of family medicine residents trained in abortion care have just been published in the Journal of Family Medicine.

Here are our key findings:

• Training in abortion in family medicine residency leads to intention to provide.
• There is a dose-response relationship for training to intention to provide manual vacuum aspiration (MVA) and medication abortion. This means that the more abortion procedures family medicine residents perform the more likely they are to intend to provide abortion care.
• More complex procedures had the strongest associations between the number of procedures preformed and future intention to provide the service. This is likely because they require more practice to achieve competency.
• Exposure to different abortion procedures has a cumulative impact on the likelihood that the resident intends to provide MVA and medication abortion in the future. So, doing more abortions in general makes it more likely that a resident will provide MVA and medication abortion.

This research highlights why RHAP’s mission is so important. The lack of training for family physicians is a major barrier to making reproductive health care accessible to everyone. These findings demonstrate the need to expand training options for these primary care providers in residency and in post-residency programs such as RHAP’s Fellowships & Training Programs. You can access the article on our website.