My previous post today was about a move to set back women’s reproductive rights to pre-Margaret Sanger (founder of the first birth control clinic in the US), let alone pre-Roe vs. Wade. However, I just came across a tidbit of news that brings a little good cheer to the otherwise dismal state of things. Today is the anniversay of the founding of the Female Medical Educational Society of Boston. In 1848, six women go together and decided to form their own medical society, since they were banned from the AMA.

However, this date is a little bit curious, considering the veritable dearth of female doctors in the US at the time. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t until 1849–a year later–that the first woman actually graduated from an American medical school–Elizabeth Blackwell, who is generally credited as being the first American female physician. Blackwell began medical school in 1847, and so was in training when this society formed.

I tried to find more information about this, as to who the six women were that founded this organization, but to no avail. Since there were no American trained female physicians at the time, I would guess that they either weren’t doctors or had perhaps been trained in Europe.

Also in 1848, the first women’s medical school opened. The New England Female Medical College, the predecessor of the Boston University School of Medicine, was founded by Samuel Gregory. His reasons were not based on ideas of equality for women in the professions, but rather for more Victorian reasons of modesty. He heartily disapproved of male physicians attending childbirth, as in order to deliver a baby, the man had to, uh-hum, peer into a woman’s private parts. The early curriculum focused on midwifery, so while it was a start, it really wasn’t what you’d call a comprehensive medical education. Then again, early medical education in general was a far cry from modern training.

So, women are still moving forward, as least when it comes to medical education. Take the history of Stanford University’s Medical School. In 1877, Alice Higgins was the first woman to graduate from the Medical College of the Pacific, which was renamed Cooper Medical College in 1882, and acquired by Stanford in 1908. In 1995, 120 years later, 42% of Stanford’s medical students are women.

Catchy heading, don’t you think? Unfortunately, I can’t take credit for it, the eye-catcher that it is. It is a sentence from an editorial in today’s New York Times, which by the way, is titled with the more mundane “Rolling Back Women’s Rights.” It is interesting how at a time when women’s rights are advancing around the globe, the only nations that are going backwards are places like Afghanistan under the Taliban–and the United States. Is that who we align ourselves with, the Taliban? Are they our role model? One would think that we could do a lot better than that. Even in Saudi Arabia, a nation that most Americans equate with oppression towards the female gender, women are moving forward and not backwards.

Anyway, the editorial is focused on a nasty little addendum that was secretly tucked into the mammoth $388 billion budget measure just approved by the House and Senate. The legislation has absolutely nothing to do with the budget measure, but the neocon Republicans stuck it in there to assure its passage. How dishonest can you get? The rest of the House and Senate have to vote for the budget, and hiding unrelated provisions in larger bills is a tactic that should not be legal.

In essence, it tells health care companies, hospitals and insurance companies they are free to ignore Roe v. Wade and state and local laws and regulations currently on the books to make certain that women’s access to reproductive health services includes access to abortion.

It remains to be seen exactly how the measure will work in practice. But the intention, plainly, is to curtail further already dwindling access to abortion and even to counseling that mentions abortion as a legal option. It denies federal financing to government agencies that “discriminate” against health care providers who choose for any reason to disregard state mandates to offer abortion-related services. This represents a vast expansion of the “conscience protection” that federal law currently gives to individual doctors who do not want to undergo abortion training.

What is even more disturbing than this legislation is the way they went about it. Why not just present it as a bill in and of itself and allow it to be voted on? Hiding it under the mounds of thousands of pages of an unrelated document seems rather cowardly to me. If you’re so keen on this, then bring it to the forefront and defend your views. Surely if it’s such a good thing, then there shouldn’t be any problem getting it passed.

At any rate, Barbara Boxer (D-CA), God bless her, wrenched a promise from the Senate majority leader Bill Frist, that there will be a direct vote on this bill. Speaking of Frist, the man is a doctor and always says that he has the health interests of Americans at heart. Well, the passage of this sticky piece of law certainly says just the opposite.