Writer-in-Training
Emory University School of Medicine
Zaynah Alam is a member of the Class of 2021 at Emory University School of Medicine. She grew up in Chapel Hill, NC and has a BS in Neuroscience from Duke University. Her interests include science fiction, health as a human right, and eating at every pho restaurant in the city of Atlanta.
Charity Scott, JD and professor of law at the Georgia State Catherine C. Henson School of Law, stood at the front of our medical school lecture hall with her arms stretched wide. “The welfare of a pregnant mother?” she said as she dipped one arm down, burdened by an invisible weight. “Or the welfare of an unborn child?”
She said, / “Doctor: / I know you’ll think I’m crazy, but / I really want to get pregnant.”
She doesn’t know that, just on the other side of the door, there is a beautiful room filled with the smell of eucalyptus, sounds of water trickling and dimmed lighting dedicated to putting her mind at rest. That next to that is a room full of grateful and relieved women looking forward to the rest of their lives.
As another ACA repeal looms in the near future — after ACHA and BCRA — the Graham-Cassidy-Heller-Johnson (Graham-Cassidy) legislation makes me think back to a patient I took care of a few months ago.
Contributing Writer
Wake Forest School of Medicine
Vaidehi Mujumdar is a medical student at Wake Forest School of Medicine. An alumna of Dartmouth College, her writing has been published in The Guardian, The Almost Doctors Channel, The Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, India.com US Edition, Media Diversified, and others. Follow her on Twitter @VeeMuj.
