FACT: UCSF is the late-term abortion training capital of the U.S.

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 abortions done after viability (after 21 weeks gestation). The Ryan Residency has trained more than 2,750 ob-gyns currently practicing in America today. The director of UCSF’s Women’s Options Center and former Chief of Obstetrics at General Hospital, Eleanor Drey, has trained and performed abortions there for 19 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. UCSF abortionist assistant, RN, and professor, Monica McLemore, ironically advocates for the care of premature newborns—should they be lucky enough to be “wanted.”

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 and 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 is a UCSF grad, the founder of Med Students for Choice, and abortionist at UCSF who has been a longtime abortion apologist for the institution. Daniel Grossman, the director of the Bixby Center program Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH), is also a practicing abortionist, ongoing abortion rights activist, and Facebook “fact checker.” Grossman 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 the Susan T. Buffett Foundation has funded, it was confirmed by the University of California in 2018 that 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 and a document on the work of Professor McLemore released last year lists several abortion initiatives he has had a hand in. Buffett has also been heavily funding the expansion of RU-486, the abortion pill, which has involved giving grants to Bixby Center researchers. The Buffett Foundation’s current director of US 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 fetal tissue research. Several high-visibility experiments, with study protocols exploiting aborted fetuses at a range of gestational ages and hundreds of animal test subjects, have been published online.

The Division of Experimental Medicine is known to have received fetal organs from UCSF’s own abortion centers as well as California-based Advanced Bioscience Resources—Planned Parenthood’s partner and the #1 baby body parts distributor in America.

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 recently cancelled 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 experimental projects at UCSF’s partnering institution The Gladstone Institutes in the year 2000.

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

FACT: Late-term fetuses meant for experimentation cannot be euthanized humanely

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 about UCSF’s general practice of not using feticides.

“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, and I know because I’m a provider there too.”

—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, up to 50% of labor induction abortions without digoxin can result in Born-Alive Infants.

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 fetal tissue, despite the known ethical alternatives.

Several NIH contracts involving fetal tissue, to one extent or another, are still active at UCSF. These projects received a combined total of almost 3 million dollars from the federal government between 2018 and 2019. Future cancellation of government funding for abortion-linked projects will likely increase the private funding, and the experiments will continue uninterrupted.

Pro-Life San Francisco has confronted Sam Hawgood and the UC Board of Regents at every bimonthly Regents meeting since September of 2019.

We have asked for transparency of their protocols for verifying signs of life and other concerns related to their fetal tissue research projects, including the practice of live dismemberment and the possibility of infants being born alive and subsequently killed for experimentation. So far, the University and the Regents have failed to respond.

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 3 babies who were delivered alive in his Philadelphia abortion clinic. Baby Boy A, 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.

The Gerlach Babies
Dr. Jörg Gerlach, an NIH funded “experimental surgeon” at the University of Pennsylvania, helped develop an In Vivo method (meaning literally “in the living”) of tissue harvesting, where babies were likely delivered alive for the purpose of acquiring pristine liver samples. The stomach churning technique, which was performed both here in the US as well as Europe, has been showcased as the best method for harvesting fresh tissue for research. One study states that the “fetuses” (aka babies born alive) 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. 

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.

At a 2014 Planned Parenthood conference, Arizona abortionist Dr. DeShawn Taylor was caught on camera making suspicious statements about born-alive survivors. Taylor is a former Medical Director for Planned Parenthood Arizona who currently runs an independent clinic in Phoenix and has also worked for Planned Parenthood Mar Monte, which operates clinics in the Bay Area.

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 always necessarily be an intentional act, as described under oath in court testimony by Dr. Forrest Smith—the longest practicing abortionist in America today. This highlights the profound need for UCSF to clarify publicly their protocol for verifying signs of life.

Fact: UCSF has failed to comply with the local Freedom of Information Act 

On July 3, 2019, Pro-Life San Francisco submitted a public records request with UCSF. The California Public Records Act states that “[n]othing in this chapter shall be construed to permit an agency to delay or obstruct the inspection or copying of public records,” and communications with UCSF show they had until about the end of October to comply with the request. There has been zero response to our follow-up inquiry from November as of June 2020.

After UCSF failed to comply, Pro-Life San Francisco retained legal counsel—prompting UCSF to provide minimal information.

UCSF has so far failed to provide the full text of their active contracts with the NIH, but has given access to fetal tissue collection and transportation logs and, in 2023, a handful of study applications. They have also provided copies of the consent forms given to patients indicating that every patient must specifically opt out of the program, contributing to the high volume of fetuses likely needed to fulfill research quotas.

The university has also confirmed that there are no documents, protocols or procedures in place on verifying signs of life or handling live-birth scenarios, even though their own curriculum admits that live births do sometimes occur during abortion procedures. All we received was a document on routine blood tests for newborns at unrelated UCSF sites.