You’ll find few stories more harrowing or heart-rending or sobering than this one, from Sunday’s Washington Post, which chronicles the journey of a medical student named Lesley Wojick, as she decides whether or not she wants to perform abortions:

“Abortion is one of the most common surgical procedures performed on women, yet nobody in medical school even talks about it,” Lesley said. “If medical students don’t talk about it, how will they learn?”

It was Christina, the Students for Choice chapter president, who proposed holding a papaya workshop to expose more students to abortion. She’d heard about such a workshop at a national Students for Choice gathering. It was a hands-on opportunity for second-year medical students to learn how to perform an abortion, using a papaya as a stand-in for a woman’s uterus. Lesley thought it was a great idea.

The women enlisted doctors, residents and nurses from Maryland and Johns Hopkins to run the workshop and e-mailed an invitation to all second-year students. They promised dinner, a sure bet to lure medical students. This time, if the dean knew about their plans, he didn’t object. Soon the workshop, which could accommodate 20 students, had a waiting list — and the women organizing it had a small firestorm on their hands.

In her e-mail, Christina had hoped to attract participants by suggesting that they’d have fun learning the procedure: “You’ll get the opportunity to be shown how to use manual vacuum aspirators using papaya models (apparently papayas bear a striking resemblance to a uterus. Who knew?)” But some of the students who received the invitation didn’t see it that way. “This is a serious matter,” one told Christina. Those offended by her tone demanded to be dropped from any future Medical Students for Choice e-mails. After consulting a dean, the women didn’t remove any names from their list, but they decided to word future missives more carefully.

On the day of the workshop, Christina wiped out the stock of papayas at a Whole Foods store. The man behind her at the checkout wanted to know what she was using them for.

A medical procedure, she told him.

Come on, tell me, he pushed. A suture?

Something like that, she said she responded. She was not about to get into an abortion discussion in the supermarket.

Bizarre as it might seem to perform an operation on a papaya, in medical school it isn’t unusual. Fruit or other food is regularly used to describe things in obstetrics. A uterus holding an 8-week-old fetus is the size of a naval orange. After 12 weeks, it is more like a grapefruit. The uterus itself is shaped like, well, a papaya.

Lesley’s eyes were drooping as she, Christina and Regina set out tortillas and taco fixings in a second-floor classroom and assembled papayas and abortion instruments at stations in a lab next door. Like the others, Lesley was recovering from a big test earlier in the week, but she also had overextended herself on the treadmill. Still, in a long-sleeve, black scoop-neck top, jeans, shiny black rain boots and a tan sweater vest tied lightly at her waist, she was a picture of elegance. Her chin-length blond-streaked hair was tied into a tiny pony tail, accenting her angular features.

“This is so cool,” said Lesley, who believed she was doing something important to address the shortage of abortion doctors. After years of defending abortion rights, she would finally learn how the procedure is done.

Ten women and three men showed up for the workshop, fewer than the organizers had expected. After heaping their plates with food and chatting about the recent test, the students cleared the lab tables for the teaching doctor to lay out her equipment and pass around photocopies of her lecture slides. Her tray contained a pair of scissors with a sharp tooth on each end, for grasping body parts during surgery, called a tenaculum.

The doctor gave a short lecture on first-trimester abortions. Then she showed the students how to grip the papaya with the scissors to hold the angle of the “cervix” straight on. With one hand, the doctor demonstrated how to administer a local pain killer, at 3 o’clock and 9 o’clock positions. She picked up different sizes of dilators used to widen the cervix and advised against pushing them in too hard, because in a soft-skinned papaya, the dilators might come out the other side. In a woman, more pressure would be needed to slide the dilator past the cervix and into the cavity of the uterus.

The doctor next picked up the suction instrument, a manually operated vacuum suction syringe. It was attached to a cannula, or thin tube, that she inserted into the papaya. She rotated it around the fruit’s cavity, pulling and pushing the syringe, suctioning the papaya’s contents.

“This is the most important thing and the hardest to learn,” the doctor said as she pulled out lots of seeds and juice, what in a real abortion she called the “products of conception,” or POC. “You put the POC into a bowl, repeat if necessary, and examine them under a microscope to make sure you got everything,” she advised.

You’ll want to read the whole thing to discover what conclusion the young doctor finally reached about how she’d spend her career.

Photo: by Karen Kasmauski, Washington Post