Janet Henrich, MD, professor of medicine and co-founder and director of the Women & Gender Health Education Program, was named the 2024 Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM) Distinguished Professor of Women & Medicine and delivered a distinguished professor keynote address during the 2024 SGIM Annual Meeting in Boston, Mass. Her keynote address was titled “An Entrustment to Lead in Post-Roe America.”
The award reflects a long career dedicated to women’s health issues in medicine. Most recently, her efforts led to the Women & Gender Health (WGH) Education Program, an innovative curriculum she co-founded ten years ago within the Department of Internal Medicine at Yale that is co-taught with a team of interdisciplinary faculty. Henrich reflects on a medical career that took place at a unique time in history, one that spanned before the ruling of Roe v. Wade and after its 2022 overturning.
The title of her keynote talk is a nod to this. “When I graduated, a very small percentage of medical students were women. Birth control pills had just been approved by the FDA when I started my medical training, and the US Supreme Court had just struck down a Connecticut law that made it illegal to buy or use contraceptives,” she said. “Part of my talk is about handing over responsibility to younger generations for advancing women’s reproductive health and gender-affirming care.”
This perspective has shaped the way she approaches the WGH curriculum. “The approach we’ve taken in the curriculum is to teach evidence-based medicine; we talk about the facts, what the legal landscape is, and how physicians can maintain their core values and beliefs regardless of what they are, based on state laws and regulations.”
The most recent curriculum year has been particularly focused on tackling politically charged topics. Residents have opportunities to engage with legal experts on political health issues. One new session this year included a discussion with a hospital lawyer to help residents understand rapidly changing laws on abortion and gender-affirming care. With these carefully crafted sessions, Henrich and her colleagues aim to promote discussion and understanding of one’s ethical obligations to their patients, and how to reconcile that with their personal beliefs, especially when laws can conflict with this.
This framework stems from Henrich’s longstanding drive to prepare physicians to navigate these complex ethical and medicolegal issues. “We have legislators in some states that don’t belong in this realm making decisions that should be made between a patient and their physician. These decisions made at the legislative level are often not based on evidence and have had harmful and unintended consequences on patient care. But if we are energized to make change, there are things we can do to fix this,” she said.
The crucial need to provide education on the most pressing issues in women’s health and gender-affirming care, and a safe environment to process and discuss them, led to the creation of the WGH curriculum, one of Henrich’s major career achievements. The course reaches almost 200 residents annually across Yale’s three internal medicine training programs.
“Regardless of your medical specialty, these laws affect you and your care of patients,” she said. “We are at a crossroads where we need to reconsider and think carefully about ethical principles of patient care and how we can stay as true to those as we can in the current political and legal climate that directly challenges some of those principles and poses restrictions that challenge our responsibilities to our patients. We must be able to provide our trainees and residents with the information and understanding that will help them in their practice no matter where they live or what career path they take.”
The WGH curriculum occurs in half-day protected educational sessions eight times per year.
SGIM is an international association of over 3,300 academic general internists. The 2025 SGIM Annual Meeting will take place in Hollywood, Florida.
General Internal Medicine is committed to the core missions of patient care, research, education, and community health from the “generalist” perspective and is one of the 11 sections within Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Internal Medicine. To learn more about their mission and work, visit General Internal Medicine.