Doctors and medical students say balancing family and career is tough
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Medical professionals face barriers to building and sustaining families, research published late last month in JAMA Network Open suggests. The study points to a variety of factors that make it hard for those with medical careers to have children, especially those with infertility or who decide on surrogacy, foster care or adoption.
Researchers drew on data from a 2021 survey of 2,025 medical students, residents, fellows and practicing physicians. Ninety-two percent of the respondents were women, and 85 percent identified as heterosexual. The survey asked respondents to answer three open-ended questions about how their careers affected their family planning.
Overall, those surveyed cited an arduous training schedule and lack of institutional conversations about family planning as barriers to family building. They also feared that having children would trigger discrimination and career setbacks.
Barriers existed at the cultural and organizational levels, the researchers found, with those who face infertility or hope to adopt or pursue foster care or surrogacy lacking insurance coverage and workplace policies to support those goals. Short, unclear or nonexistent family leave policies were also cited, as was difficulty finding child care.
Interpersonal factors also played a role: Those without children said they felt overextended when others in their programs took parental leave, while parents reported resentment from their co-workers.
Overall, the researchers write, “the stories from more than 2000 respondents in this study depict a harsh reality in which the medical profession creates and sustains barriers to family building,” including pushing them to delay their family plans until training is complete.
Those experiences echo the findings of other studies, such as one 2014 analysis that found female surgeons have fewer biological children than the national average, get pregnant at an older age and are more likely to experience infertility than their counterparts in other professions, probably due in part to their advanced maternal age.
All parents, not just pregnant ones, reported difficulties, and the researchers recommend improved insurance coverage and parental leave coverage that is inclusive for LGBTQ+ individuals and takes “family building” strategies such as surrogacy and adoption into consideration. The researchers also recommend that medical schools implement curriculums on family building and suggest that institutions provide better coverage to ease the burden that family leave can place on remaining co-workers.
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