ACOG meeting holds strong focus on legality of abortion, provider mental health

Key takeaways :

• This year’s ACOG meeting features a specific focus on minding mental health for women’s health physicians.
• This meeting will also focus on the legality of abortion in the U.S. and its impact on women’s health.

BALTIMORE — The president of ACOG spoke to attendees of the 2023 annual meeting regarding the importance of mental health and overcoming women’s health challenges in the past year.

“During my year as president, our patients lost the reproductive health protections of nearly 50 years of precedent. ACOG members were suddenly thrust into uncertainty. Some of you watched as alternating court decisions led to upheaval in the legality of abortion. Some of you struggled to figure out how and even when to intervene to save patients’ lives. Some of you went into overdrive to help support patients who were able to travel to you,” Iffath A. Hoskins, MD, FACOG, president of ACOG, said during the opening ceremony. “I want to assure you that those of us with the honor of leading our organization, ACOG, during this time have been driven every single day by identifying ways to leverage ACOG’s powerful voice, our evidence-based policies, our national position of authority and opposing bans on health care.”

ACOG’s response to the Dobbs decision became priority in tandem with the mission to address mental health. Mental health suffers when a physician’s ability to provide care or apply expertise and training to patient situations is curtailed and even worse so when it is “stripped away,” Hoskins said.

“It is indeed all intertwined,” Hoskins said. “Reproductive health care is health care. Mental health care is health care. Our mental health is critical to our ability to be doctors to provide care for our patients, including reproductive health care.”

The ACOG Annual Clinical & Scientific Meeting features sessions on the history of the U.S. reproductive laws and the current state of reproductive rights, implications of the Dobbs decision for women’s health care and the current legal focus on mifepristone.

“Much of what we’ll be learning about in the coming days will center on topics that are so critical to all of us about a nuanced understanding of what medicine for us right now is all about,” said Constance Bohon, MD, FACOG, scientific program chair of ACOG. “We’ll also have sessions that focus on diversity, equity and inclusion and how our understanding of equity among our OB/GYN community will have downstream benefits for our patients and their communities.”