NTNU’s Medical Students Most Liberal

Recently, the Center for Medical Ethics has given out a comprehensive opinion survey to Norwegian medical students. This has mapped the students’ attitudes towards abortion, write ABC News, who have retrieved their information from the Journal of the Norwegian Doctor Society.

The most liberal students are those at NTNU in Trondheim, where 93.5% of the students are for the right to choose an abortion. Bergen’s medical students are more conservative and a total of 23% of them are against the right to choose abortion. However, medical students are generally more in favor of the right to terminate a pregnancy than the rest of the population. A survey from 2010 showed that 76% of Norway’s population are for the right to choose abortion.

More than one in four medical students still say they would use their right to refuse to perform such an operation. This means that a large fraction of the medical students support the right to make decisions regarding one’s own body, but think that carrying out the abortion would be too difficult.

This can imply that the practical part of instruction can color a student’s outlook. While nearly all of the medical students had been present during an abortion, only about half of Bergen’s medical students have had the same experience. Oslo’s medical students are the group where most have said they would have problems performing the operation- 33% of these students said they would use their right of refusal. In Trondheim and Tromsø, only one of ten students had been present during an abortion during their studies.

About one third of the responses were dissatisfied with the ethics instruction which discusses termination of pregnancies.

“Having a good understanding of what this kind of operation implies, everything from ethical questions the actual carrying out, are important with regards to accepting the phenomenon,” says Kersti Elisabeth Styren, leader of the Norwegian Society of Medical Students.