Without Roe, OB/GYN residents in pro-life states may no longer face pressure to commit abortions

According to MedPage Today, OB/GYN residency has remained a competitive specialty in the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) for rising physicians. While applications for OB/GYN residency fell slightly from 2,161 to 2,100 applicants in a year’s time, 1,500 of the 1,503 available positions were filled and quickly claimed. However, MedPage reports that most of the applicants sought placement in a pro-abortion state.

The push for OB/GYNs to commit abortions

MedPage Today reports that for the first time since 1973, 2023 residency applicants have “compiled their match and rank lists” with the knowledge that Roe v. Wade was overturned and preborn children are now protected from abortion in numerous states. According to a study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, more than three-quarters (76.4%) of medical residents said they would not apply to states with legal consequences for committing abortions. Yet, just 27.1% said they planned to commit abortions as part of their career, lining up with data that shows that most OB/GYNs in the US do not commit abortions.

That’s something abortion advocates would like to change. Dr. Ian Fields, OB/GYN residency program director for the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) School of Medicine, said he expects more applicants to apply to OSHU from pro-life states. OHSU has built a program for medical residency students who have residencies in pro-life states so they can attend OHSU for two to four weeks for the sole purpose of learning how to commit abortions. In late 2022, it hosted one such student and said it plans to host as many as 14 this year. The abortion training program at OHSU is free.

However, it is unclear if medical students want to partake in abortion or if they have been led to believe it is necessary for their chosen career. Dr. Christina Francis, a board member and CEO-elect of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said her organization receives requests from medical students who are looking for residences in which they won’t be forced to partake in abortion or give abortion referrals. Without Roe in place, medical students in pro-life states are no longer pressured to carry out abortions.

“Now we’re seeing residents and medical students who don’t want to participate in abortions saying, ‘We are going to seek out residency positions in places where abortion might be restricted’ because — theoretically and I think this will play out — there should be less pressure placed upon them,” she told AP News.

Abortion is not health care

While abortion advocates claim every OB/GYN should be trained in committing abortions in order to ensure they are able to give their patients care, induced abortion — the intentional, direct killing of an undelivered human being — is not actually medically necessary, even in cases in which the pregnancy must end in order to save the mother’s life.

Preterm delivery in emergency situations can be carried out without actively killing the preborn child. Induction of preterm labor — to save a life without the intent of causing the child’s death — is not an abortion and is not prohibited by state laws. In short, induced abortion — which is what pro-life laws prohibit — are procedures that are carried out with the intent of ensuring the child is dead.

Maternity care deserts

Despite this, as abortion advocates claim abortion is necessary health care and push for wider access and training for medical students, they ignore the fact that maternity deserts are growing across the country.

As previously reported by Live Action News, 36% of all US counties are “maternity care deserts.” March of Dimes reported that “access to maternity care is diminishing in places where it’s needed most, impacting nearly seven million American women of childbearing age and roughly 500,000 babies.”

The 2022 Maternity Care Deserts Report defines maternity care deserts as “counties without a hospital or birth center offering obstetrics care and without any obstetrics providers.” Between 2020 and 2022, the loss of obstetric providers and services was responsible for decreases in maternity care access in over 100 counties.

As Live Action researcher Carole Novielli explained, despite the fact that less than half of rural women live within a 30-minute drive to a hospital with perinatal services, “abortion advocates continue to prioritize abortion over actual health care.”

For example, New Mexico has no gestational age limit on abortion and has multiple abortion facilities, yet there are 11 maternity care deserts in the state. Rather than invest in more hospitals and obstetrics care, the governor is laser-focused on building a $10 million abortion facility.

Abortion facilities do not provide maternity care. The largest abortion business in the country — Planned Parenthood — claims to offer prenatal services but only provides an estimated 1% or less of the prenatal services in the U.S. The corporation’s prenatal services plummeted 72% from 2010 to 2020, and it commits 43 abortions for every one prenatal care service it provides.

Yet, pro-abortion politicians continue to fund Planned Parenthood — $618.1 million for 2020-2021 alone — $9.3 billion since 2000. And abortion advocates continue to push for expanded access to abortion while ignoring the desperate need for maternity care for women who want to give birth.

A need for readily available maternity care is almost never discussed by abortion advocates, who focus instead on the supposed lack of abortion access, pointing to more abortion as a possible “solution” for decreasing the maternal mortality rate (particularly among the Black community) in the U.S. But OB/GYN Dr. Ingrid Skop recently told Feminists for Life, “Unfortunately, Black women are consistently documented to have three times as many maternal deaths compared to White women. Unexamined, however, is the fact that they also have three times as many abortions. If abortion were protective, we would see a different trend.”

In Kansas, Benedictine College revealed plans last year to create the Saint Padre Pio Institute for the Relief of Suffering, School of Osteopathic Medicine, an independent medical school that is pro-life. Dr. George Mychaskiw of Catholic Healthcare International, which partnered with Benedictine to create the new school, explained in an article for Aleteia that there is a unique challenge that pro-life students face at many medical schools, noting that it is “very daunting” to be asked as a medical student to violate one’s moral convictions.

“It’s very hard for students to do that; they’re in a very vulnerable position,” Mychaskiw explained, “which is why our clinical training network will be in faithful Catholic institutions, and any physician that takes our students in as clerks… has to agree to maintain Catholic bioethical principles in their teaching and… protect them from being forced to participate in procedures or therapies that would violate our principle.”

There were 61 fewer applicants for OB/GYN residency programs this year; at this point, it is unknown whether that is due to pressure medical students are under to participate in the killing of innocent children through abortion.

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