FACT: UCSF is the abortion training capital of America

There are over 100 active abortion training programs across the country run and funded by UCSF through the Kenneth J. Ryan Residency and Fellowship in Family Planning. This training includes aborting viable babies — children who are old enough to survive outside the womb as preemies. The Ryan Residency has trained over 2,700 ob-gyns who are currently practicing across the country today.

The Director of UCSF’s Women’s Options Center and former Chief of Obstetrics at SF General Hospital, Eleanor Drey, has trained and performed abortions there for over 20 years. Her stated goal is to “maintain and increase the number of abortions” UCSF provides in order to increase the number of residents and students they train. Abortion nurse and former UCSF staff member Monica McLemore has ironically advocated for the care of babies at the same age should they be lucky enough to be “wanted.” Watch UCSF leaders talk about their work here.

FACT: UCSF is the most politically involved medical institution on the issue of abortion worldwide

All of UCSF’s abortion initiatives take place under the banner of The Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health. Making abortion a universal, routine part of obstetrics & gynecology training is one of their stated goals. Political advocacy is also incorporated at all levels in the center — from the curriculum of their students to the regular work of its professors and leaders. Director Jody Steinauer, a UCSF grad and founder of Med Students for Choice, has been a longtime abortion apologist for the institution — even taking their message beyond California to stop pro-life laws. Daniel Grossman, the director of the Bixby program Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH), is a practicing abortion doctor who speaks internationally and has acted as a Facebook “fact checker.” He led the way in forcing every public university in California to provide first trimester abortions on campus.

FACT: Billionaire Warren Buffett has been funding UCSF abortion programs for decades

Although it has been historically hard to trace exactly which UCSF initiatives his foundation has funded, it was confirmed in 2018 that Warren Buffett gave $52 million to the Ryan Residency Program between 2012 and 2017 alone! Tax records show that he has been funding the Bixby Center — formerly called the Center for Reproductive Health Research & Policy — as early as 2001. A document on the work of Professor McLemore released in 2019 lists several abortion initiatives he has had a hand in. Buffett has also been heavily funding the expansion of the abortion pill, which has involved giving grants to Bixby Center researchers. The Buffett Foundation’s current director of U.S. programs, Tracy Weitz, is also the founding director of the Bixby Center’s ANSIRH program. These ties run deep.

FACT: UCSF engages in well documented, high profile fetal tissue experiments

For decades, UCSF has been involved in both fetal organ harvesting and fetal tissue research. Several high-visibility studies have been published online, with study protocols exploiting aborted fetuses at a wide range of gestational ages and hundreds of animal test subjects,

The UCSF Division of Experimental Medicine is known to have received fetal organs from the university’s own abortion centers as well as California-based Advanced Bioscience Resources — the #1 aborted body part distributor in America. Unfortunately, this is not the only research division at UCSF known to engage in the targeting of pregnant families.

FACT: Many experiments rely on a monthly supply of late-term human fetuses from elective abortions

One of the most infamous examples of this is a contract between the National Institutes of Health and UCSF which required a team of scientists to acquire two fetuses per month for a period of 6 years. This agreement was a renewal of a similar 6-year contract. Head researcher, Professor Cheryl Stoddart, began these experiments even further back in the year 2000 at UCSF partnering institution The Gladstone Institutes.

The term “elective” means these fetuses were healthy and free from abnormalities, fatal or otherwise. It also means these pregnancies were not the result of sexual violence, and neither the life or health of the patient were at risk. Many of these healthy babies were over 21 weeks old, which means they could likely survive outside the womb if born prematurely and provided medical care.

FACT: Late-term fetuses meant for experimentation cannot be killed with heart attack inducing drugs

Digoxin, the lethal injection often used to ensure fetal demise prior to an abortion procedure, cannot be used on fetuses intended for medical research. According to Scientific Reports and Contraception Journal, feticides severely compromise the quality of fetal tissue.

Dr. Deborah Nucatola, former Medical Director of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, spoke on hidden camera about UCSF’s practice of not using feticidal injections.

“Like I said, if you want no dig[oxin], your options right now are, like, UCSF and Planned Parenthood New York City, and that's it. And the reason it’s Planned Parenthood New York City is because they all trained at UCSF. So, it’s like ‘the UCSF school.’ They’re, to my knowledge, the only people that don’t use dig above 20 to 22 weeks. It’s going to be hard to get those bigger cases. But like I said, New York City is worth going for…that, other than UCSF, is the largest site of 20 to 24 week cases that have not gotten feticide…”

—Dr. Deborah Nucatola

FACT: UCSF performs late-term abortions two ways...live dismemberment and labor induction

According to their online lectures, UCSF trains and performs abortions on viable, pain capable fetuses either through a D&E procedure, where the fetus is disarticulated (dismembered) alive and removed in parts, or a medical induction, where the cervix is softened with misoprostol and labor is induced.

FACT: Medically induced late-term abortions can result in born-alive infants up to half of the time

The Centers for Disease Control, the Congressional Research Service, and the Society of Family Planning have all verified the reality of abortion survivors:

“In the literature describing induction termination, there have been multiple case reports of unintended live births. Less commonly, this outcome can occur before or during D&E if the patient begins laboring before the surgical extraction begins or has enough cervical dilation to allow the fetus to be removed largely intact… This issue can arise more frequently when multiple days of osmotic dilators are used and labor occurs before the D&E procedure, or in induction abortion that was not preceded by the use of a feticidal agent.”

—Drs. Eleanor Drey and Justin Diedrich

And according to The Society of Family Planning, the risk of live births during digoxin-free Labor Induction abortions can reach as high as 50%.

This naturally raises concerns over the treatment of abortion survivors behind closed doors. Another cause of concern for us has been the suspicious statements made on hidden camera by a mainstream abortion doctor, Dr. DeShawn Taylor of Arizona. Knowing that this attitude is accepted by public figures anywhere in the country — particularly one who partners with UCSF — doesn’t give us confidence in our local institutions.

FACT: Fetal tissue research continues to this day at UCSF with the full support of university leadership

Sam Hawgood has been at UCSF for over 30 years in various capacities and is now the Chancellor of the entire University. He is one of the most outspoken defenders of abortion-linked fetal tissue research in the nation and has openly stated his hostility to any restrictions on the use of aborted remains, despite the known ethical alternatives.

Several National Institutes of Health contracts that involve the targeting of pregnant families before abortions are still active at UCSF. These projects received a combined total of almost 3 million dollars from the federal government between 2018 and 2019 alone. In the future, with further cancellation of these contracts, any state or private funding these experiments receive would not be affected, unfortunately.

We have confronted Sam Hawgood and the U.C. Board of Regents at dozens of Regents meetings since September 2019. We have asked for transparency regarding their protocols for verifying signs of life and other concerns related to their fetal tissue research projects, including the practice of live disarticulation in utero and the chance of infants being born alive and used for experimentation. So far, they have failed to respond. One such member of the Regents who heard our voices and stayed silent is now a Senator for the state of California: Laphonza Butler.

FACT: Abortionists have historically failed to provide life-saving care for infants born alive during abortions

Baby Boy A
In 2013, Dr. Kermit Gosnell was sentenced to life in prison for killing three babies who were delivered alive in his Philadelphia abortion clinic. Baby Boy A, who was pictured in the grand jury report, was one of likely tens of thousands of infants killed by Gosnell and his staff over the course of decades, as noted by members of the grand jury. To make their report easier to spread, we have created a shareable short-link: bit.ly/gosnell-grand-jury

Unnamed Survivors
In 1981, reporters Liz Jeffries and Rick Edmonds documented dozens of cases of neglected survivors and interviewed medical experts for further insight on the phenomenon of “live-birth abortions.” Dr. Thomas Kerenyi of Mount Sinai Hospital called born-alive infants "the dreaded complication” and Dr. Willard Cates of the CDC made several blunt observations about abortion providers: "It's like turning yourself in to the IRS for an audit...What is there to gain? The tendency is not to report because there are only negative incentives...No one is so naive as to think there is reliable voluntary reporting of live births in the present climate.” Jeffries and Edmonds became Pulitzer Prize finalists for their articles.

The Gerlach Babies
Dr. Jörg Gerlach, an NIH funded “experimental surgeon” at the University of Pennsylvania, helped develop a method of tissue harvesting where babies are suspected to have been delivered alive, based on timing protocols, for the purpose of acquiring pristine liver specimens. This stomach churning technique, which was performed in the US and overseas, was showcased as the best method for harvesting fresh tissue for research. One study states that the bodies were immediately transferred for liver collection after the abortion “before they underwent the routine pathological examination.” The more pristine the organs, the more useful they are for research purposes.

Rescued Survivors
Some born-alive infants are lucky enough to actually receive medical care and survive long-term, but help doesn’t always come right away. Born in the mid 80s and late 90s, Tim Guido and Ximena Renaerts were intentionally neglected by hospital staff. Tim, who had Down syndrome, was abandoned for 9 hours while Ximena was left alone for 40 minutes⁠, suffering severe brain damage as a result.

FACT: UCSF does not make public their protocol for ensuring fetal death

Neglect of an abortion survivor wouldn’t necessarily be an intentional act. This was stated by Dr. Forrest Smith — the longest practicing abortion doctor in America. His observation highlights the profound need for UCSF to publicly clarify their protocol on checking for signs of life before setting aside intact abortion victims for dissection and tissue collection. Signs of life would include, for example, a faint pulse in the umbilical cord.

FACT: UCSF initially failed to comply with the local Freedom of Information Act 

The California Public Records Act states that “nothing in this chapter shall be construed to permit an agency to delay or obstruct the inspection or copying of public records.” Communications with UCSF from after our July 2019 request show that they had until October to comply. However, we were never sent records that year. Even our follow-up inquiry in the month of November got radio silence.

After UCSF failed to comply, we retained legal counsel — prompting UCSF to begin providing records in July 2020. UCSF has so far failed to provide the text of their active contracts with the NIH, but they have given us access to many of their fetal tissue collection and transportation logs. In 2023, they sent us a handful of study applications connected to old projects that are no longer active. We were also provided copies of the consent forms given to patients which contribute to the high volume of fetuses likely needed to fulfill research quotas.