We, the undersigned medical students from New York and across the U.S., call on New York Governor Kathy Hochul to include in the executive budget Assemblymember Harvey Epstein's and Senator Liz Krueger’s bill to create a reproductive health care training fund in New York.

This important legislation amends state public health and finance laws to enable medical residency programs in New York to establish or expand programs to train interns and residents from abortion-restricted states in the abortion procedure, in accordance with current Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education standards. Funding would cover a range of expenses for hospitals and residents alike, including start-up costs, personnel fees, and trainee-related expenses like travel and lodging.

These grants will serve as an essential stopgap measure to protect abortion training for Ob-Gyn and Family Medicine residents. Recent studies estimate that up to 45% of the 286 Ob-Gyn residency programs in the U.S. are located in states that are certain or likely to ban abortion, preventing at least 2,600 residents from developing foundational skills in abortion care. This data likely underestimates the scope of the true problem, given that other specialties such as Family Medicine also provide abortions. This sets a dangerous precedent: if future physicians do not learn to perform abortions, it will be even harder for future patients to access them, exacerbating the U.S.’s current maternal mortality crisis.

As medical students, we recognize that abortion training during residency is particularly crucial in light of the severe inadequacies in undergraduate medical education around abortion. Limitations on abortion rights, access, and training are already impacting every medical student in the United States, regardless of whether providing direct abortion care will be a part of their future practice. Even prior to Dobbs, medical schools have historically lacked a national curricular standard for abortion education, allowing half of all U.S. medical schools to provide no formal training or just one single lecture on abortion. This disparity will worsen in the absence of Roe v. Wade, with 70.77% of the 129,295 U.S. medical students now living in states with abortion restrictions that will limit their training. This places even more onus on residency programs to train future doctors in safe abortion care.

Further, this bill could attenuate the negative impacts that abortion restrictions will have on medical students’ residency applications. A recent survey of third and fourth year medical students across all specialties— not just Ob-Gyn— showed that 60% would not apply to residency programs in states with abortion restrictions. Though this bill cannot address every adverse effect of abortion restrictions, it can help to redress applicants’ fears that their clinical training will be subpar in states that restrict abortion by providing them an alternative.

As medical students, we stand with medical residents. Together, we are the future physician workforce that faces unprecedented challenges. By establishing the reproductive health care training fund, New York can protect the integrity of residency training, which in turn safeguards patient and population health.

Governor Kathy Hochul, we urge your action in the executive budget to secure the opportunity for New York to become a first-in-the-nation leader in protecting reproductive health care training.