Obstetricians Wanted: No Mothers Need Apply

I was an obstetrician, and then I was a mother, until I had to give up the one for the other.

This wasn't the way I planned it, and I grieve for the loss. I spent 4 years in medical school and another 8 in residency, and I always assumed I would work until I dropped. I wasn't dissuaded by the length of training, or the $100 000 worth of loans, or the inroads on my nights and weekends. No, I envisioned a career filled with satisfying clinical work, grateful patients, and ongoing intellectual challenges, in which I would forever rise to the occasion. In a parenthetical kind of way, I knew some people who began families in medical school, and some in residency; there were even a few brave souls who had children before they were in medical school. What choices they had to make, I don't know; I wonder now, but it didn't register then.

During the time I was in training, obstetrics and gynecology became, in more ways than one, a women's specialty. I vividly remember one obstetrics–gynecology department chairman, incensed because several of his chief residents were pregnant, harrumphing that there was no place for pregnant women in his specialty. That was before women made up, as they do today, the majority of …