In January 2019, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education approved a new subspecialty for the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology: Complex Family Planning. Dr. Patrick Marmion, an associate professor at Washington State University, says that the new subspecialty is a smokescreen to normalize killing nearly full-term prenatal babies.

Ethics & Medicine, an international medical journal, published an analysis by Marmion in its spring 2020 issue titled “‘Complex Family Planning’ and the Assault on Conscience.” Marmion traced the history of the new subspecialty and the tax-funded efforts of medical institutions to pressure residents into committing abortions back to 1991 when the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco, implemented its Fellowship in Family Planning.

In 1999, Bixby inaugurated the Kenneth J. Ryan program to train ob-gyn residents in abortions. The Ryan Program pledged to pay the salary of Fellowship in Family Planning doctors if they were appointed as faculty at academic centers and charged with training residents in abortion techniques. Federal grants supply over half of the $42 million dollars that Bixby funnels to these programs.

In 2004, Bixby launched the Society of Family Planning and, harnessing the prestige it gained from the takeover of a medical journal, Contraception, it garnered pledges from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid to supplant private funding.

The Ryan Program creates a powerful incentive for institutions to include abortion in their ob-gyn programs: another faculty member at no cost to the medical school. Once abortion is part of the program, residents themselves are then forced to opt-out — and risk ridicule and retaliation — if they do not want to participate in abortions.

In 2009, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommended that “opt-out” programs become the norm, replacing programs that allowed residents to “opt-in” if they wish to participate in abortions. By 2018, the Ryan Program was active in 37 percent of ob-gyn residency training programs, and only 30 percent were still “opt-in.”

Because they have the power to set requirements, review institutions, and place institutions on probation, the accreditation council and the board of obstetrics and gynecology can increase the pressure on the remaining “opt-in” hold-outs to switch to “opt-out” or to close.

As “opt-out” programs close and more slots open, the Complex Family Planning fellowship is poised to corral residency slots at taxpayer expense. Medicare funds graduate medical education, but the number of federally-funded residency positions is capped at 110,000. The accreditation council and the college of ob-gyns influenced the drafting of the Affordable Care Act to allow unused residency slots to be redistributed and they are currently pushing the Resident Physician Shortage Reduction Act in Congress to increase the number of funded residency slots.

A report published in 2018 revealed that 93 percent of obstetricians and gynecologists will not perform abortions when requested by their patients, and that number increased seven percent over the preceding seven years – hence the effort by abortion advocates to bloody the hands and dull the consciences of residents.

“They force them to be complicit in committing atrocities, victimizing vulnerable girls and women,” Marmion concludes his analysis. “This rite of initiation ensures their shared responsibility and diminishes the possibility of subsequent moral dissent.”

The above story, an exclusive to California Catholic Daily, was written by Mary Rose.