Advocate for choice

Andrea Harris

Carolyn Payne poses for a photo outside of UTMC. Payne is a fourth-year medical student studying to become an OB-GYN and abortion provider.

Abortion is a highly controversial and polarizing subject that’s usually spoken about in hushed whispers — but Carolyn Payne wants to talk about it out loud.

Payne is a fourth-year medical student at the University of Toledo who has spent time volunteering in abortion clinics since she was a freshman at the University of Michigan. She plans to become an OB-GYN and abortion provider and is advocating to alleviate barriers that prevent women from getting the medical procedure.

Last week, the National Abortion Federation presented her the Elizabeth Karlin Early Career Achievement Award for her advocacy work.

“It was really important for me to see that procedure and to see the women who went there and to work with them,” she said.

Payne recalls first growing interested in the cause during a women’s and gender studies class that discussed abortion and women’s reproductive rights.

“I think that abortion is probably the most divisive issue in this nation,” Payne said. “People get very worked up about it; people have very strong opinions about it. As a freshman in undergrad, I just really wanted to form my own opinions about this topic that people felt so passionately about. I always think the best way to have an opinion about something is to learn about it for yourself firsthand.”

During the summers of 2012 and 2013, she started volunteering at a Planned Parenthood in Cleveland where she gained first-hand knowledge and perspective about the issue from physicians, staff, patients and even the protesters outside the clinic.

“From there, it made real, clear sense to me why women needed this service,” she said. “I felt a lot of empathy and compassion towards them, and I felt sad that so many of them have to travel so, so far to get the procedure done.”

As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Payne said she became involved with Medical Students for Choice, a student organization that advocates for women’s rights to reproductive health.

Once she graduated and came to UT, Payne founded the UT College of Medicine’s MSFC chapter.

Payne said the organization is important to her and other students at UT because it adds to the limited view they learn in the classroom.

“For the most part, it’s not in our medical curriculum,” Payne said. “They say one-in-three women will have an abortion. It’s so common, yet it’s just not talked about in our medical curriculum.”

To further teach medical students about how abortion services work, Payne and other members organized lectures, journal discussions and hands-on activities.

“Using the same devices that doctors use to perform abortions in their office setting, we are able to simulate on papayas how to actually dilate the cervix, or dilate the fruit, extract the contents and teach them hands-on,” she said.

The organization quickly began holding regular formal and informal meetings and used its time to advocate on these issues.

“Due to our shared passion for advocacy and social justice,” said Julia Roberts, a UT medical student and MSFC secretary, “we helped to revitalize the group, gain visibility on campus and organize collective protests and meetings with administration when our school-affiliated hospital refused to accept patients from the local abortion clinics in the case of complications.”

During her second year of medical school, Payne volunteered with other students at the Center for Choice, a local clinic that provided abortion services.

“We made a partnership to the local clinic in town, the Center for Choice, and they were cool with having students in there to observe and watch the procedure,” Payne said.

But this partnership was cut short. In 2013, Lloyd Jacobs, the UT president at the time, did not renew transfer agreements with the two abortion clinics in Toledo on the grounds that UT should take a more neutral stance on the issue.

In Ohio, there is a law that requires freestanding surgical centers to have transfer agreements with a local hospital that says the hospital will take emergency transfer cases from clinics. If there is no transfer agreement, the clinic cannot operate legally.

However, Payne disagreed that this neutral position was the right choice.

“The reality of that is that when you don’t have that agreement, the clinic closes, which means that women don’t have access,” Payne said. “So that, in fact, wasn’t a neutral position at all.”

Payne believes the unwillingness of Jacobs to sign transfer agreements was unconstitutional.

“A woman has the right to have an abortion as determined by the Supreme Court in 1973, and the university making this decision, it was placing what further Supreme Court decisions have called an ‘undue burden’ on women,” she said. “You’re allowed to put restrictions on women’s access to abortions so long as it doesn’t create an undue burden for her to access that service.”

After the Center for Choice was forced to close, Payne and her fellow students could no longer volunteer or receive education there.

“There’s all these backhanded ways that they are cutting off access to abortion services,” she said.

Payne said that across the county, anti-abortion laws and regulations have become increasingly popular. Consequently, according to the Guttmacher Institute, 1.1 million American women obtained abortions in 2011, and that number has continued to decrease since 2008.

According to Payne, this can be explained by both the increased usage of highly effective contraceptive methods as well as increased barriers to abortion services that inhibit some women from accessing them.

Payne said Ohio has a lack of skilled providers to perform second-trimester terminations. According to Ohio law, a woman must consent to spending 24 hours after an initial consultation deciding whether she wants to carry out the decision. If she’s a minor, the woman must obtain parental permission.

A bill is currently sitting in the Ohio Senate that would make it illegal to terminate a pregnancy if a heartbeat can be detected. According to New Health Guide, a baby’s heartbeat can be heard during the sixth week of gestation.

The bill has already passed the Ohio House of Representatives.

“Our barriers are political, so that’s where I have focused a lot of my efforts,” Payne said.

Through her advocacy for the American Medical Association, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the Ohio State Medical Association and National Abortion Rights, Payne is determined to engage herself in the nationwide debate.

In addition to changing the political atmosphere, Payne said the fight for these feminist issues has to be a social one too.

“We try to make parallels to the gay rights movement,” she said. “It’s no longer mainstream, or publically acceptable to discriminate against the LGBT community — but 30 years ago this community was very publically stigmatized.”

So what happened to change this?

“I think that what happened is that more and more people that identified as LGBT ‘came out’ to their friends and communities, and in doing so people realized people who identified as LGBT were not weird or deviant people,” Payne said. “They were their loved ones; they are normal people deserving of equality and human rights like everyone else.”

According to Payne, abortion activists are attempting a similar strategy, encouraging women to tell their stories with the hope of destigmatizing the experience.

Payne said abortion hasn’t always been illegal. As she speaks, her words come quickly and fluently — like her attitude toward advocacy, she doesn’t stop.

She also said she believes women are losing their equal right to reproductive health, something she said she is passionate about fighting for.

“I went into medicine to make a difference,” she said. “Providing abortion services is something that I can do to make huge positive difference in a woman’s life. It feels like very meaningful work and I’m happy to do it. I hope more of my colleagues will feel the same.”