One of the most striking reminders of Women in Medicine Month is that women’s health and policy issues are everyone’s health and policy issues.
Without investment in understanding the US’s unconscionably high rate of maternal mortality, families and communities lose women to fatal and often preventable complications of pregnancy.
Without preserving women’s reproductive health care choices, individuals and families lose vital options that enable them to thrive socially, emotionally, professionally, and economically.
Let’s pause there for a moment. For physicians, the involvement of politics in women’s health care threatens to prevent us from providing the best evidence-based care to our patients. It threatens to undermine the trust on which the patient-physician relationship is centered. That’s why the Society is working to preserve the autonomy of physicians in the medical space, including our ability to counsel patients on their full range of options for birth control or an unplanned pregnancy (MMS Acts against Gagging Physicians on Reproductive Health Care).
We are so fortunate that we have a substantial influx of women going into medicine and engaged in the delivery of health care. I’m proud of the work being done by the Massachusetts Medical Society to advance and elevate women in medicine and the talent, skills, and leadership of more than one in three practicing physicians.
Our new Women Physicians Section — launching in 2019 — will expand the Society’s capacity to identify and address the barriers to women physicians’ success.
The leadership of the AMA on gender pay equity in medicine — an effort spearheaded by two of our members — demonstrates how effectively women physicians and their allies can initiate meaningful change (Massachusetts Physicians Push the AMA to Lead on Gender Pay Equity).
— Alain A. Chaoui, MD
