We Must Transform Healthcare by Supporting the Next Generation of Pro-Life Medical Professionals

I was getting ready to head back to my hotel after giving a talk to a group of medical professionals when one of the attendees, a young woman, came up to me in tears. She introduced herself as a local second year medical student.

Through her tears she told me that ever since she was about five years old, she had dreamed of one day being an OB/GYN. It was why she had entered medical school. But then she began to see how much pressure medical students and residents received in their OB training to endorse and perform abortions – something that she was deeply opposed to. She told me that she had recently told her husband that she was going to have to find a different specialty – the risk of having to violate her conscience as an OB/GYN was just too high.

My heart broke for this young lady. I understood her turmoil all too well. In medical training, I was taught that obstetrics is a unique specialty because physicians are treating two patients at once: a pregnant mother and her preborn baby. The goal, I was told, is a “healthy mom and healthy baby.”

One obvious implication of this principle is that induced abortion – which intentionally ends the life of the preborn baby – goes against the very purpose of my profession. Consistent adherence to sound medical ethics requires rejecting this practice.

Unfortunately, our nation’s major medical institutions lack this consistent ethic. For example, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), the largest OB/GYN professional organization in the country, advocates for induced abortion at any stage of pregnancy and for any reason. ACOG claims to represent all OB/GYNs in its radical stance despite the fact that 76 to 93 percent of OB-GYNs do not perform induced abortions. It also attempts to manipulate physicians (and the public) into dehumanizing our preborn patients, such as using semantic games to falsely claim that human embryos do not have heartbeats.

Pro-life medical professionals’ conscience rights are protected by federal law. However, ACOG and other medical organizations have made it clear that they have a low view of life-affirming practitioners’ values. In one of their documents, ACOG states that doctors who do not want to perform abortions should make referrals for them, even though helping to arrange for an abortion still constitutes participating in what the physician considers to be an act of killing.

Sometimes the pressure to violate their conscience is more insidious for medical trainees. For example, in 2018, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME, the sole accrediting body for residency programs in the US), began requiring that OB/GYN residency programs offer abortion training by default as part of their normal curriculum – claiming to be in compliance with conscience protections as residents are allowed to “opt out” of this training. This is in contrast to the prior “opt-in” requirement (which was in place for decades), which made this training available only if residents asked for it.

For residents who are pro-life or uncomfortable with performing abortions, this opt-out requirement is coercive. At this stage of their careers, it is crucial that doctors are viewed positively by their superiors, who are teaching and evaluating them. Telling their attending physicians that they do not want to do something that is considered part of the “standard” curriculum requires significant courage and is likely to hurt their residency experience, if not their future career prospects. One pro-life resident, upon opting out of abortion training, was required to design her own alternative curriculum on top of the 80 hours per week that she was already working.

Medical students and residents are the future of life-affirming healthcare. Pressuring them to perform procedures that end the life of one of their patients will not only impact their lives; it will also affect the medical care that’s available to all American women, babies, and families in the coming decades. The medical student I spoke to is far from the only young, bright, pro-life student I know who felt discouraged from pursuing obstetrics because of the suffocating pro-abortion medical culture. The medical community’s intolerance for life-affirming practitioners will rob pregnant women of competent doctors who care equally about both them and their babies. For the millions of pro-life women in this country, this prospect is bleak. And for the millions of women who already live in maternity care deserts and lack access to pregnancy care, this possibility is dangerous.

For this reason, there has never been a more important time for pro-life advocates to rally behind pro-life medical professionals than right now.

Pro-abortion forces within the medical community are abusing the name of science and medicine to push their extremist political agenda. In this cultural environment, pro-life medical professionals feel isolated and alone. But together, we are stronger.

That is why the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) invests in its student and resident member community through its annual conference, educational webinars, and more. We organize an annual scholarship program that covers all costs for medical students and residents to attend our annual conference. Year after year, we are flooded with words of gratitude from our student members expressing that our programs give them the support they need

One recent message from a medical student stands out. She told me that, before attending our conference, she thought the abortion issue “was too nuanced and complex ... to advocate for life-affirming care.” But after completing one of our training sessions at the conference, she “felt equipped to speak clearly on this issue” -- so much so that just three months after our conference, she found herself “championing life-affirming medicine before faculty and 200 of [her] peers.”

Soon after, some colleagues asked her if she “would represent a motion to modify our curriculum in favor of a more balanced abortion narrative” than the one that they were being taught. The motion passed, and her faculty is changing her assignments to ensure that “students critically analyze the impact [of abortion] on both the maternal and fetal patient.”

This is the kind of change we can see when the pro-life community supports the next generation of medical professionals. Together, we can forge a new, life-affirming path forward for all Americans – doctors and patients, born and preborn.

Go to aaplog.org/mobilize for more information on life-affirming medicine.