Students and medical professionals, for the first time, can go online for formal training on abortion care, thanks to a new class offered through the University of California, San Francisco.

The course, titled “Abortion: Quality Care and Public Health Implications,” offered through a massive open online course (MOOC), walks students through all things abortion, from its history and legalization in the United States, to clinical aspects of later abortions, to the relationship between early pregnancy loss and abortion care.

More than 3,000 people are already registered for the class.

Jody Steinauer, an associate professor at UCSF and course instructor, explains on the course’s website that it seeks to “fill in the gaps left by [abortion’s] exclusions from mainstream curricula in health professions.”

Abortion is one of the most common medical procedures performed in the United States, but access to care is limited by restrictive legislation and a lack of providers. Half of all pregnancies are unintended, and about half of the women facing an unintended pregnancy will get an abortion. In 2005, 1.2 million abortions were performed, compared with just 341,000 appendectomies, 398,000 gallbladder removals, and 575,000 hysterectomies.

A decrease in the number of abortion providers has in no small part compounded the obstacles to care created by restrictive legislation. The number of abortion providers has decreased upwards of 15 percent over the past two decades, and in 2011, though 97 percent of OB-GYNs had patients seeking abortion, only 14 percent could offer the service themselves.

Most women of reproductive age now live in states hostile to abortion rights, according to Medical Students for Choice.

A lack of educational opportunities is at least partly to blame for the provider shortage, and medical professionals say that the stigma associated with abortion is carried over into the classroom, deterring potential providers from choosing a profession mired in controversy, harassment, and violence.

A 2005 study found that one in four OB-GYN students in their third year had no formal education on abortion. Thirty-two percent of medical schools offer a single lecture on abortion during clinical years, and clinical experience in abortion services is not integrated into student education as it is for other types of services.

Dr. Eve Espey, chair of the OB-GYN department at University of New Mexico’s School of Medicine, told Rewire that there is so much stigma around abortion, that even at educational institutions “people whisper the word abortion. People rarely talk about it, much less learn about it.”

“[The] polarization of public opinion in the abortion debate is reflected in the curricula of medical schools,” Espey said in a phone interview.

Steinauer’s class aims to fill the gap in abortion education, and Espey said that the class will “de-stigmatize abortion by mainstreaming it.”

“It will really take abortion out of this moral dimension and place it squarely in the medical and public health domain,” which will help students see it as a health care issue, she said.

“I think that if we can inspire even a small portion of the people who take the course to take steps in their communities to increase access to safe abortion and decrease stigma about abortion, then we have been totally successful,” Steinauer said in an interview with the Daily Beast.