Abortion industry concerns about a shortage of abortionists may be short-lived. According to Reuters, two abortion doctor training programs are reporting a new influx of students this year.
The new report contradicts growing fears among abortion activists about a shortage of abortion doctors in the U.S. In 2013, California legislators even used the situation as an excuse to allow nurses to do abortions.
In the past few years, the abortion industry has managed to sway some young medical students, mainly women, to train to do abortions in the name of women’s “needs,” according to the report. Abortion advocates are persuading the young trainees with language that paints abortionists “heroes” for doing what few others will – kill unborn babies.
The report has more:
Medical Students for Choice was started in 1993 by a student at the University of California, San Francisco. The nonprofit now has 185 chapters and a $1.4 million annual budget funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Rockefeller Family Fund and others.
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Last year, it sent 137 medical students and residents for abortion training, more than twice as many as in 2010. Its two-day and three-day Abortion Training Institute has received 321 applications so far this year, surpassing the 228 who applied in all of 2015.
The Kenneth J. Ryan Residency Training Program was started in 1999 by Uta Landy, who ran one of the first abortion clinics after the procedure was legalized.
While obstetric-gynecology residencies are required to offer abortion training, not all do. The Ryan program has helped set up and expand family planning and abortion training at 85 teaching hospitals – including 31 since 2010 – which train about 1,000 residents a year.
The program declined to discuss its budget or funding. It is a part of the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco, which does not disclose contributions at the program level.
Tax disclosures show the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, which supports abortion rights, donates to many of the universities that host Ryan program training. But it does not disclose the purpose of those donations, and representatives did not respond to phone queries.
… Landy, the Ryan program founder, said laws limiting abortion are stoking interest in training.
“The more controversy there is,” she said, “the more motivation, commitment and passion grows and responds.”
However, Randall K. O’Bannon, director of education and research for the National Right to Life Committee, told Reuters that the abortion industry is deceiving medical students with their rhetoric about heroism and compassion.
“They have been promoting and recasting the image of the abortionists in the United States,” O’Bannon said. “They want to make them appear noble, heroic, but they’re not.”
In total, the two programs say they train more than 1,000 doctors and medical students every year in “reproductive services” including abortion. However, abortion activists complained that abortion-trained doctors are concentrated in cities; and few provide abortions in rural areas.
A number of abortion clinics, especially in rural areas, have closed in the past few years because they could not find replacements for retiring abortionists, according to a recent Bloomberg analysis.
Abortion activists blame pro-life laws, social stigma and fear of violence as the reasons why so few have chosen a career in the abortion industry. While it seems that more pro-abortion students are choosing that path, other numbers indicate that the demand for their abortion “services” is shrinking.
Fewer women are having abortions in the U.S. thanks to pro-life efforts to provide them with accurate information and life-affirming support. A 2015 national report from the Associated Press indicates that abortions have dropped 12 percent nationwide and are down in almost every state in the country as more babies are being saved from abortions than ever before.
Meanwhile, other countries are seeing young medical students reject abortion in greater numbers as modern technology sheds more light on the value of life in the womb.
