Ali Block
speaker
886 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2023
last heard Oct 2023
Ali Block’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And what are the costs, both to the status of abortion rights, but also on healthcare workers at an individual level?
What does it mean to not talk about this very basic aspect of healthcare?
To start, let me introduce Emily Patel.
Emily stayed in the state for both undergrad and med school, before heading to North Carolina for her maternal fetal medicine fellowship at Duke.
Soon after she finished, she headed back to Omaha.
For Emily, abortion was never a central part of her pull towards medicine.
Had she not moved back home, Emily would likely rarely have put that training to use.
There were so many other providers at Duke who offered that kind of care already.
But when she found herself back in Nebraska, she discovered that if she didn't provide DNEs for patients with miscarriage or life threatening complications, there were very few other providers who could.
So it was a pragmatic decision, not a political one.
In 2020, the Nebraska State Legislature made a move to tighten up abortion restrictions.
They introduced a bill that would ban DNEs, the most common surgical procedure used in second trimester abortions.
This mindset of keeping your head down, avoiding conflict, Emily says it's how she got through her medical training.
And this is really common and something that comes up a lot on this show.
Like there was this time during her training that a superior threw forceps at her in the operating room for making a small mistake.
So that was her MO.
And it kept her out of trouble in medical school, residency, and fellowship, and in her early career.
But in twenty twenty two, news of the Dobbs decision made it feel like that MO was no longer an option.
Within the first year, Emily and her colleagues raised over four hundred thousand dollars for targeted spending on key legislative races.
They testified at numerous congressional hearings and successfully lobbied to have the Nebraska Medical Association, the most powerful medical group in Nebraska politics, commit to opposing any new anti abortion legislation.
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