“We have to get beyond the damn rhetoric,” Dr. John Bruchalski tells a group of medical students on a recent stop in his second annual National Medical Students for Life Tour.

He’s talking about the a-word, abortion — the one many of us just don’t want to have to talk about. Including in med school.

“Dr. B,” as he’s known, reads from a Washington Post article that ran a few years ago, in which a medical student recalled witnessing her first abortion and her struggle to reconcile the gruesome reality with her pro-choice views.