Medical research is the basis of better health for the world’s people.Family planning provides among the best examples of the powerful association between research and health.Modern contraception and safer abortion are direct products of fifty years of basic and clinical, laboratory and population-based, research.Over the past 20 years training specifically for contraception and abortion research has created a “new generation” of investigators who are building the “evidence-base” for contraceptive and abortion care.This chapter identifies some of the most important contributions of the graduates of “The Fellowship in Family Planning” and their colleagues at leading medical schools and hospitals, WHO, CDC and other research organizations.It describes their training in research methods and the impact it has had on clinical practice and women’s health worldwide.

Although academic obstetrician-gynecologists were important advocates for legal abortion, few teaching hospitals became sources of abortion care in the USA. Instead, private clinics provided nearly all abortions and medical students and residents had little opportunity to learn about abortion.Likewise, when contraception was earlier legalized, the major sources became Planned Parenthood and public health department clinics funded through the US Government’s Title X Program.Academic organizations responsible for training obstetrician-gynecologists recognized these deficiencies and moved to require training in family planning and to set standards for it.A few major teaching hospitals provided models for such training.Their efforts were emulated and financially supported at training programs around the USA through the “Ryan Residency Training Program in Abortion and Contraception” reaching one hundred programs over a 20-year effort.Because teaching hospitals largely ignored abortion and their reproductive endocrinologists were busy with IVF, academic training programs failed to develop researchers in abortion and contraception.In response to the need for clinical research and teaching in family planning, post-residency fellowship programs were simultaneously established in 30 medical schools, eventually leading to recognition in 2020 of “Complex Family Planning” as one of the official subspecialties of obstetrics and gynecology.

The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) became the first site for the Fellowship in Family Planning when Dr. Philip Darney enrolled Dr. Dilys Walker as a fellow in 1991. UCSF subsequently became home to two national programs: the national Family Planning Fellowship, founded to develop physician-leaders in reproductive health, and, soon after, in 1999, The Ryan Residency Programs, conceived by Dr. Uta Landy, a nation-wide initiative to integrate and enhance family planning training for obstetrics and gynecology residents. Now with 30 fellowship sites at leading US medical schools and over 100 Ryan Residency Programs, faculty, fellows, and residents provide family planning care and training, and conduct a broad range of family planning research. These two programs have led to improved clinical care, teaching, education, research and culture change in academic medicine and the field of family planning in the US and around the world.