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Teaching abortion techniques with papayas
Spero News ^ | 4/18/2013 | Rebecca Oas

Posted on 04/18/2013 5:38:56 PM PDT by markomalley

The latest effort to recruit abortionists relies on stealth and fresh fruit. Using a papaya as a uterus, medical students learn abortion techniques under the guise of “miscarriage management.”

One activist group boasts that the “papaya workshop” is now part of resident training at a Catholic hospital that prohibits abortion. A group of pro-abortion doctors in the UK declared 2013 “the year of the papaya” in response to the recent growth in popularity of this training exercise that has existed for several years.

Originally developed as a way to demonstrate an abortion technique called manual vacuum aspiration, the papaya is also used to demonstrate the manual scraping of tissue from the uterine walls­ and the placement of IUDs after abortion.

In a video series demonstrating the papaya workshop, Dr. Jody Steinauer acknowledged the controversial nature of the techniques she teaches: “Depending on my learners and the environment in which I’m teaching it, I sometimes frame it as a miscarriage case and sometimes as an abortion case.”

Dr. Philip Darney, chief obstetrician at San Francisco General Hospital, fondly recalls going on missions for US in the early 1970s taking manual abortion kits to other countries, such as Indonesia, to enable clandestine abortions. According to Darney, the abortion kits provide “a way to both treat women who have had unsafe abortions and accomplish safe abortion.”

Darney describes portable abortion kits as safe and said that the manual syringe is preferable in places where electricity is unreliable. What about cleanliness in places without electricity? The papaya videos don’t deal with it.

While the videos do not address cleaning the instruments or other infection precautions, Steinauer did find time to offer a full demonstration of scraping uterine walls. “The papaya, especially when it’s not very ripe, when (scraped), feels exactly like an empty uterus,” she said.

While a papaya may bear similarities to a human uterus, there are key differences. After attending one of the workshops, one medical student was uneasy. “It’s a lot more invasive than I thought,” she said. “A papaya doesn’t bleed and scream.”

Many training programs that use manual vacuum aspiration as miscarriage treatment receive funding from groups that promote abortion. Teaching materials specifically target doctors and support staff who express reluctance because of the close association with induced abortion. One nurse raised concerns about her ability “to emotionally disconnect those two because I have such strong feelings about abortion.”

Promoters of “miscarriage management” training are calling for research showing whether exposure to their workshops can shift attitudes about performing abortions.

In some places, the relationship between papayas and pregnant women has long been an uneasy one. In some regions of Asia, it was commonly believed that papayas were dangerous for expectant mothers, and modern research has shed light on the reason: unripe papayas contain a type of fruit latex that can induce uterine contractions and potentially cause a miscarriage.


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Extended News; Foreign Affairs
KEYWORDS: abortion; moralabsolutes; mva; prolife
Using papayas as uterine models to introduce medical students and residents to the Manual Vacuum Aspiration has proved to be an excellent teaching tool.

Instructions to group leader for Papaya Workshop

Equipment

The first step to a successful papaya workshop is collecting the necessary equipment and papayas. A store supplying the smaller “Hawaiian” or “Brazilian” papayas, as opposed to larger “Mexican” ones, should be located in advance, as the proper type may be hard to find. The papayas work best if they are somewhat ripe and not too green, but they do ripen quickly so don’t buy them too far in advance. Ideally, each participant should have his/her own papaya, though in large groups two learners can usually share one.

MVA equipment sets can be shared by groups of four to ten students, depending on how many sets are available. At a minimum, each MVA set must include dilators, a #10 cannula with adaptor, and the aspirator. Depending on the resources available, the following equipment may be added to make the simulation more realistic: speculums, tenaculums, syringes, ring forceps, gauze, and emesis basins. Also useful to have on hand are cups or pitchers of water to rinse out cannulas that are clogged with seeds, and paper towels for clean-up.

The Workshop

A papaya workshop for students or residents should begin with an introduction to abortion care. One meaningful way to model compassionate abortion care to students is a role-play in options counseling. The role-play should demonstrate patient-centered counseling for a patient seeking an abortion – focusing on her decision between medication and aspiration abortion. Many students and residents are surprised that family medicine physicians can do abortions in primary care settings, and others have only seen counseling in abortion clinics.

The role play scenario is attached. The scenario is flexible. If you are doing this for adolescent medicine physicians, you can have the patient be a teenager; if you are talking to physicians who care for the homeless, you can make the patient be a homeless woman. You can make the point that women from all walks of life get abortions, and that your role-play is just one of many common scenarios. Another way to do the role-play is just to ask for a volunteer from the audience to be the patient. You prep her that her preference should be for an aspiration procedure, so that you can end up spending a bit more time describing an MVA, since that is what you will demonstrate on the papaya, but otherwise she can just pretend to be a woman who needs an abortion and who knows nothing about the two options. At some point in the role-play, it works well to open the questions up to the audience, asking, “If you were the patient, what other questions would you have?” This assures that you have covered everything the group wants to know. If the questions begin to overwhelm the time you have allotted, you can ask the students to continue their questions in their small groups when they work on the papayas.

Next, it is helpful to demonstrate once for the whole group the way the aspiration procedure is done. During this demo, you can model the language that family physicians use to talk the patient through the procedure. You can also do a “bimanual exam” on the papaya, demonstrating to students what ante-verted and retro-verted positions of the uterus.

To prepare the papaya, you must pick the stem remains off. Be careful not to remove more than necessary or you may subsequently lose the seal around your cannula. The area under the stem is what you treat as the cervical os. If the papaya is still green and hard, it helps to roll it against the table to soften it, and thus allow the seeds to be aspirated. If you use a tenaculum in your demo, be sure to apply it horizontally so that it does not communicate with the "cervical canal" or you will lose suction. Dilate to a #10 and then use a #10 flexible cannula to aspirate the seeds. Learners often lose suction or find that the seeds get stuck. This is a chance to talk about troubleshooting the cannula and the aspirator and explaining that similar problems occur in reality.

For audiences with little clinical experience, such as first- and second-year medical students, it is important to remember that many have never observed a gynecologic exam, and may have no idea what the names of the instruments are, and what their uses might be. They don’t know about uterine position that can be determined from a bimanual exam, so all of this needs to be explained both visually with the papaya and verbally as you demonstrate.

This workshop is a great opportunity to model language for the group. Explain to them when you use the betadine on the cervix that we don’t want to say, “Now I’m cleaning your cervix,” because that implies to patients that we think the vagina is dirty. It’s better to say, “Now you will feel a wet solution on a scratchy gauze against your cervix” or “I am wiping with an antiseptic so that I don’t allow any bacteria to enter your uterus.” If you are using the papaya workshop to teach residents prior to learning to do MVAs on patients, you may want to be more thorough with every step of the procedure, explaining no-touch technique, and having them handle each instrument repeatedly, emphasizing how to cock the aspirator, release the tenaculum, etc. In this instance, thorough practice on the papaya can advance competency with the instruments in a much less charged setting, rather than having the residents first learn on an actual patient.

1 posted on 04/18/2013 5:38:56 PM PDT by markomalley
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To: little jeremiah; wagglebee; narses; Salvation

pro-life / moral absolutes ping


2 posted on 04/18/2013 5:43:00 PM PDT by markomalley (Nothing emboldens the wicked so greatly as the lack of courage on the part of the good -- Leo XIII)
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To: markomalley

I am going to vomit.


3 posted on 04/18/2013 5:45:15 PM PDT by svcw (If you are dead when your heart stops, why aren't you alive when it starts.)
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To: svcw

Seriously, WTF is wrong with people?!?


4 posted on 04/18/2013 5:49:01 PM PDT by EEGator
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To: svcw

You beat me to the punch.


5 posted on 04/18/2013 5:58:36 PM PDT by diamond6 (God is good.)
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To: EEGator

One must offer up human sacrifices, young and innocent requirement, to the god Molech, read all about it in 2 Kings 21:1-15.


6 posted on 04/18/2013 6:07:29 PM PDT by zerosix (Native Sunflower)
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To: zerosix

Is that the owl deity that’s supposedly at Bohemian Grove?


7 posted on 04/18/2013 6:11:38 PM PDT by EEGator
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To: EEGator
Nope, Molech was the god to which Judah King Manasseh offered human sacrifices.

God finally gave up on the Hebrews living in Judah and allowed them to be killed or carried off into captivity and removed them from the Promised Land.

To this day, the remnants do not dwell in that land without strife.

8 posted on 04/18/2013 6:42:44 PM PDT by zerosix (Native Sunflower)
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To: markomalley

Well, why the hell not. They teach kids to put condoms on cucumbers, don’t they? And Moo is pushing consumption of more fruits and veggies ... this ought to make her ecstatic. Geez, what a sick world we live in.


9 posted on 04/18/2013 8:25:28 PM PDT by Fast Moving Angel (A moral wrong is not a civil right: No religious sanction of an irreligious act.)
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To: markomalley

So... to these ghouls, women are no more than pieces of fruit. Abuse them for as long as one wants, then throw them away like garbage.

And what’s with all the talk of women “needing” abortions? Unless a woman has a medical emergency making abortion necessary—a very rare circumstance—she never “needs” an abortion.

What horrible “training” for medical students. Presumably, they entered medical school because they want to heal people—and these ghouls try to eliminate every bit of that compassion. Monsters.


10 posted on 04/18/2013 8:28:47 PM PDT by exDemMom (Now that I've finally accepted that I'm living a bad hair life, I'm more at peace with the world.)
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