Yes, I wouldn’t recommend majoring in nursing if you want to go to medical school. The prerequisites for nursing school are different (overlapping, largely - in addition to A&P and microbiology you generally also have to take chemistry, statistics, psychology, English, social sciences and possibly some other courses) and the kinds of ECs you have to do for med school admissions you won’t have time to do in a nursing curriculum. I also think you won’t really have the time or space to minor in biology, between clinicals and your nursing coursework.
HOWEVER. It sounds like what you really want to do is provide primary care to women and babies. So why not become a certified nurse-midwife?
A certified nurse-midwife (CNM, for short) is an advanced practice registered nurse (APRN) that provides primary care to pregnant women and their eventual babies. APRNs are nurses with master’s degrees and usually several years of experience. So to become a CNM, you’d have to get a bachelor’s degree in nursing and then get a master’s degree in nursing in midwifery (most nursing schools have this). Most nurses work in-between the BSN and the MSN for a few years to gain experience, although increasingly these days you don’t have to.
CNMs do pretty much everything an ob/gyn would do - they give annual exams, they do patient education about women’s health and wellness, they give prenatal exams, they assist women in labor, etc. Experienced CNMs can also sometimes handle more complex cases with fetal distress and high-risk pregnancies, although those do tend to be handled either by MDs or in tandem with MDs. But if your basic goal is to help bring babies into the world, a CNM might be a perfect fit for you. Nurse-midwives do adhere to the nursing model, which is more focused on patient education and holistic care than the medical model.
- Essentially, the nursing model accounts for the whole patient, not just the disease or condition requiring treatment. It allows nurses to deliver care to patients using a systematic approach of assessing, planning, implementing and evaluating patient care - this is a cyclic nursing process with detailed guidance for each step of care.*
A lot of women these days are actually specifically seeking out CNMs for prenatal, antenatal and postnatal care because they like this model. CNMs often do things like help women make birth plans, educate them about how to take care of their body, interface with their family members, help them get access to other care if they’re poor, etc. (It’s not that MDs don’t do those things - but they are built into the nursing model). Studies also show that women get fewer interventions during birth like episiotomies and Pitocin - although that may be partially because of the nursing model and partially because CNMs work with lower-risk pregnancies.
CNMs don’t make as much as OB/GYNs - the median annual wage is around $93,000 a year for CNMs; I think it’s closer to $160-180K for OB/GYNs. However, they also don’t go to school for as long and don’t have as much debt as MDs. CNMs can also do their MSN part-time, which can lower the cost - since you’d have an RN you can work full-time while you attend school part-time, or you can work part-time and attend school full-time, and offset your living expenses considerably. You can also go to a public university and save some money. So while the overall salary might be lower, you’ll also have fewer loans to repay. And nurses have their own flexibility and achievement ladder, so if you eventually wanted to move up you could go into charge nursing, nursing leadership (aka becoming the Director of Nursing at a hospital), nursing education/faculty (maybe getting a PhD and teaching nursing to new nurses), consulting, etc. There’s a lot of things you can do in nursing.
Anyway, consider that. The unfortunate truth is that this is one of the times when you have to choose a path - if you want to do the MD you need to major in something that is not nursing and do the pre-med prerequisites. If you want to be a nurse, then you should major in nursing. But you can’t really major in nursing and hedge your bets.
The silver lining, though, is that there are lots of programs for people who have non-nursing bachelor’s degrees and later want to become nurses (and CNMs). So let’s say that you majored in biology and then decided senior year darn, I really wanted to be a nurse. You could go somewhere like [Columbia’s master’s direct entry](http://nursing.columbia.edu/admissions-and-financial-aid/how-apply/masters-direct-entry-mde-mdednp-mdephd) program or Yale’s [graduate entry program in nursing](Graduate Entry Prespecialty in Nursing (GEPN) | Yale School of Nursing) and get your RN and MSN in three years, and go directly into midwifery. Or you could get an accelerated BSN from one of the hundreds of programs that exist and then go do a normal MSN program after. (And similarly - if you majored in nursing and decided senior year you want to be a doctor - you could do a post-baccalaureate premed program and go to med school. Neither choice will be set in stone for the rest of your life; the barrier is the time and money it takes to switch after you’ve made a decision. So choose wisely, because it’s easier that way, but don’t feel like you can’t make any mistakes or change your mind.)