PETA’s New International Women’s Day Video Calls Out OHSU for Pig Mutilation

In a new video for International Women’s Day (March 8), PETA stands with patients who receive obstetrics and gynecology (OB/GYN) healthcare and sends a blunt message to Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU): “Stop mutilating live animals in OB/GYN training.”

Narrated by a physician, the new video urges the university to ban the use of live animals in its OB/GYN physician residency training program, which makes doctors-in-training maim pigs by using them as stand-ins for humans.

OHSU’s trainees cut into live female pigs, dissect their organs, and perform other invasive surgeries on them in attempts to learn human medicine. Any pigs who survive these ordeals are later killed.

In addition to the video, PETA’s OHSU campaign includes a letter to the university, a mobile billboard, and a full-page advertisement in Oregon’s largest newspaper, The Oregonian. The ad names more than 100 accredited OB/GYN physician residency training programs that—unlike OHSU—don’t use live animals and instead use advanced animal-free training methods.

OHSU Impedes Women’s Healthcare

Familiarity with complex human anatomy can mean the difference between life and death in medicine. Pigs and other animals can’t accurately mimic this complexity.

Patients who rely on OB/GYN doctors for their health and care deserve physicians who are trained using the most advanced and modern technology available. That’s why Aurora Sinai Medical Center, Rush University Medical Center, and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center ended their use of live pigs for OB/GYN physician residency training in favor of animal-free simulation technologies after hearing from PETA. Even the U.S. Department of Defense banned the use of live animals for its OB/GYN physician residency training and instead uses superior, human-relevant simulators.

What You Can Do

Please TAKE ACTION and tell OHSU to ban the use of live animals in its OB/GYN physician residency training program:

And if you’re in the U.S., please take an additional action for animals by supporting PETA’s Research Modernization Deal, which outlines a comprehensive strategy for replacing all experiments on animals with more effective, human-relevant, non-animal methods.