Racialized abortion training program raises red flags due to 'Negro Project' similarities

An expose in The College Fix has exposed how an abortion training program funded by the State of Maryland is working to "increase racial and ethnic diversity among health care professionals with abortion care education" by “working to prioritize recruiting providers of color.”

This effort is raising red flags among those familiar with Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger's so-called 'Negro Project,' which intentionally sought to recruit Black leaders and doctors to promote a eugenics-based message to the Black community less than a century ago.

Key Takeaways:

• A new abortion training program is prioritizing and funneling taxpayer funds toward the recruitment of medical professionals of color.

• In 1939, the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, similarly sought ministers of color in an attempt to promote a eugenics/birth control agenda to the Black community.

• The University of Maryland Baltimore hosts the Maryland Abortion and Reproductive Clinical Health (MARCH) Program, which will use grant money from the state to increase racial and ethnic diversity among abortionists.

The Backstory:

In 1939, Margaret Sanger created her “Negro Project,” as described in a letter she penned to fellow eugenicist Clarence Gamble regarding her desire to use Black ministers to further her organization’s birth control agenda for minorities. “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” she wrote. But if it did, she knew Black ministers could help to “straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

Live Action News previously documented that many of Sanger’s board members were deeply entrenched in the racist philosophy of eugenics.

Planned Parenthood itself became steeped in the eugenics community, even utilizing office space from eugenics organizations for free; after all, the agendas were nearly identical. The first office of the International Planned Parenthood Federation in London was provided to the organization free of charge by the Eugenics Education Society.

After spending decades adamantly denying Sanger's racism, Planned Parenthood has, in recent years, acknowledged Sanger's racist and white supremacist views, and attempted to distance itself from her, essentially scrubbing her legacy from its websites.

Now, a modern-day program appears to be following Sanger's lead by using grant money from the state to "increase racial and ethnic diversity among" abortionists.

The Details:

A fund to pay for Maryland's Abortion Care Clinical Training Program was established in 2022 by the Abortion Care Access Act. As Governor Wes Moore detailed:

• The Moore-Miller Administration's FY 2025 $5 million allocation to increase Medicaid provider reimbursement for abortion care and reproductive services

• The Maryland Department of Health has awarded a $10.6 million grant to the University of Maryland, Baltimore, to administer Maryland’s Abortion Care Clinical Training Program. 

In a press release, the governor described how the University of Maryland would be using those taxpayer funds:

The University of Maryland, Baltimore, will utilize its grant to expand the number of healthcare professionals with abortion care training, increase racial and ethnic diversity among health care professionals with abortion care education, and support the identification of clinical sites to offer training.

Program funds will be distributed to participating organizations including Planned Parenthood of Maryland to operate a community-based clinical site and the National Abortion Federation to support the University of Maryland, Baltimore in developing the statewide training system.

That specific program at The University of Maryland Baltimore (UMB) is the Maryland Abortion and Reproductive Clinical Health (MARCH) Program which, according to its website, "aims to expand access to comprehensive reproductive health care across Maryland by providing targeted education and training to current and future health care providers."

Jessica Lee, MD, an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who is also co-principal investigator on the training program, claimed the program will “specifically address training clinicians in underserved areas and rural areas in Maryland.”

UMB's MARCH Program "aims to close gaps in access and create a sustainable model for reproductive services statewide," the website states.

The Abortion Care Clinical Training Program 2024 Annual Legislative Report stated in part:

MARCH is targeting recruitment towards APC [advanced practice clinicians] providers, including those practicing in counties that lack an abortion provider, and providers in private, urgent care, emergent practice, and rural settings... MARCH is working to prioritize recruiting providers of color... [to] Increase the racial and ethnic diversity among health care professionals with abortion care training...

Seventeen currently practicing clinicians have been trained across two cohorts. Procedural abortion exposure training and medical abortion simulation training for existing clinicians began in the summer, less than a year after UMB’s contract was awarded... 38 applicants already eligible for 2025 cohorts...

The program utilizes the TEACH Curriculum and abortion training workbook which is published by the University of California San Francisco's (USCF) Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health. UCSF/Bixby operates Ryan Residency abortion training programs nationwide. The UC system has been dubbed the 'nerve center of the abortion industry' and receives billions from American taxpayers and pro-abortion philanthropists like the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation (Warren Buffett).

The University of Maryland's School of Medicine hosts a Ryan Residency abortion training program under the leadership of Kiranpreet K. Chawla and Jessica Karen Lee.

Nationally, the Ryan Residency program began in the 1990's, funded heavily by the Buffett Foundation and based at the Bixby Center for Global Health at the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF). It has reportedly trained over 7,000 OBGYNs in how to kill preborn children by abortion.

Connection to late term abortion facility

An internal email obtained by Live Action News and dated November 17, 2025, claimed that the "MARCH Program has currently trained 77 licensed and practicing clinicians (92% are APCs) in early abortion care."

The report stated that "MARCH has established a contractual agreement with at least one clinical training site," which appears to be the C.A.R.E. Reproductive Health abortion facility, formerly operated by late-term abortionist LeRoy Carhart, who died in 2023.

This site supports the abortion training program, according to the clinic's website, where induction abortions are committed into the third trimester of pregnancy — outside the standard of care.

After Carhart died, one media report claimed that "Dr. Tyrone Malloy took over as medical director. However, Malloy primarily operates out of the Maryland clinic as its main doctor."

Malloy, a Black abortionist tied to early abortion pill trials, was at one time reprimanded by Georgia’s medical regulatory agency in the surgical abortion-related death of one of his patients. Years later, he was arrested and convicted of Medicaid fraud — a charge he later claimed was expunged.

A heavily redacted open records request with the University of Maryland obtained by Live Action News included e-mails that document ongoing conversations with CARE, which appeared to center around something called the "Maryland Clinical Abortion Training Network (MCATN)" as well as the Maryland Abortion and Reproductive Clinical Health (MARCH) Program.

Email subject lines included:

• MARCH/ MCATN / Student Trainees this Spring

• MARCH / CARE/ Budget Template

• MARCH / CARE/ Invoice Template for review

• MARCH/ CARE/ Additional Pis

An email dated January 9. 2025, described CARE's abortion reimbursement structure as "based on volume at any given week" and requested instead "how much an individual's base salary is, and how much effort % they will contribute towards the MARCH program."

An email response from CARE sent on February 18, 2025, stated that "Our physician has indicated the budget should include $500/week for the three doctors and then the rest can be adjusted according to the hourly pay for the two nurses and admin."

On January 24, 2025, CARE was informed that there had been a "lack of enrollment" in the MARCH program; however, the university told CARE, "We are still moving forward with creating contractual relationships with your clinic."

In May, a "UMB CARE Contract" was emailed.

"Your template already has the 50K line items included as part of the pre-fill as what you can invoice UMB immediately. Once you have trainees rotate through, then you can invoice for the staffing and non-personnel costs," the May 14, 2025, e-mail read.

On November 13, 2024, CARE was sent an "affiliation agreement."

CARE responded on November 17, 2025:

I'm glad to hear about MARCH's success with hosting students! CARE Reproductive Health has availability to host this Spring and I've copied our physicians in this thread. Please let me know of any additional information you may need. All the best

Program Application Requests Race/Ethnicity

The (MARCH) Reproductive Health Fellows application requests demographics information on race/ethnicity as follows:

MARCH program applicants will be approved once the National Abortion Federation completes a background check.

The 2024 legislative report stated:

UMB MARCH will begin work with a marketing team in early 2025 to assist in recruiting additional Maryland clinicians. The target demographic will include clinicians practicing in rural areas and in counties with no abortion providers, and racial and ethnic minority clinicians.

A survey sent to 103 abortion providers at 25 clinic sites found they were "typically White (48.5%, n = 32) or Black/African American (31.8%, n = 21)" and that "Just over half (52.0%, n = 13) of all sites are currently serving as a site for clinical training of residents, fellows, or students," the report claimed.

Race-based recruitment efforts raised red flags

"These explicit race-based recruitment efforts raised 'red flags' with one civil rights attorney who spoke with The College Fix," the media outlet reported, explaining:

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission states it is “illegal for an employer to publish a job advertisement that shows a preference for or discourages someone from applying for a job because of his or her race, color, religion, sex… national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information.” 

The Bottom Line:

William Jacobson, law professor at Cornell University and founder of Equal Protection Project agreed and told The College Fix that “Giving racial preferences in recruiting potentially is a violation of law."

“Any program receiving federal funding must comply with the civil rights laws along with any specific non-discrimination terms of the funding,” Jacobson told The Fix in a recent email. “Such obligations would preclude discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin.”