Program Director
Janet L. Stein, MD
Beth Israel Medical Center
First Avenue at 16th Street
9 Baird Hall
Department of Ob/Gyn
New York, NY 10003

Phone: (212) 420-4655
Fax: (212) 420-2980
E-mail: Jstein@bethisraelny.org
Web Address: http://www.wehealnewyork.org

Contact Information
Jill L. Damiani, BA
350 E 17th Street
Baird Hall, 8th Floor
New York, NY 10003

Phone: (212) 420-4548
Fax: (212) 420-2980
E-mail: jdamiani@chpnet.org


Contact information last updated: 8/18/03

We learn about 1st and 2nd trimester abortion, surgical more than medical.
We have a rare opportunity - our OR books abortions right in with all the other cases. Abortion is not isolated to a specific clinic. Our private attendings will frequently have abortions mixed in with the rest of their OR cases on any given day. The general attitude (from attendings, nurses, OR staff, residents) about abortions is no different than the attitude towards hysteroscopy, D&C, laparoscopy, etc. I haven't experienced any abortion stigma. This has made a difference to a few of my fellow residents who were on the fence about actually performing them. When they were faced with the situation, they hesitated but most of them realized that this was just one of the other procedures patients came to them requesting.
We do not have a huge termination service like at city hospitals. You could get more volume of training at a city hospital. We schedule our own service abortions (about 0-5 per week) and take part in the private attendings abortions (0-10 per week).
We have multiple service attendings and one private attending that does 2nd trimester abortions. Past residents have gone to a local clinic that does a lot of 2nd trimester abortions. Our program director is very supportive of that. We have an established connection with this clinic. Some residents in the past have done research with this clinic.
We see a fair number of complications through our ER from two area clinics. This is good training even for the residents that don't perform abortions.
I think that all of our faculty attendings do abortions. Some of the residents don't but we don't have such high volume that the rest of us suffer.
Abortion is included in our didactic training.
Our counseling experience takes place in our continuity clinic or the ER when our patients present with an unplanned pregnancy.
Most of the abortions we do are done with sedation. This is, in my experience, a New York thing. One factor is that Medicaid pays for abortion here so people are not paying out of pocket for sedation. This allows for more technical training by the attendings but changes the doctor-patient skills required.

-Submitted by a 3rd-year resident, 9/9/00

Things have deteriorated in five years. Abortions are scheduled in the OR, leading to unnecessary delay and roadblocks to access for our patients. Often, attendings who do not perform abortions are the covering attendings for a given day or week, and then abortions cannot be scheduled. It leads to such long delays that it is often in the best interest of the patients to refer them to a free-standing abortion clinic, at the expense of our training. Our chair has made it clear that he considers providing outpatient abortions in our clinic to be "not cost effective", and so we only offer them in the OR. While the atmosphere is generally prochoice, the actual number of procedures we do is small, owing to the above limitations and I have been encouraged to do an away rotation if I really want to learn abortion technique.

-Submitted by a resident, 11/28/05

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