A former medical student attending the University of Louisville (Kentucky) School of Medicine (ULSOM) filed suit last month against 13 of the school’s faculty members. He complained that he was ousted just before graduation in retaliation for his pro-life views.
Austin Clark filed suit on July 23 in Kentucky’s Western U.S. District Court, claiming that the faculty members’ harassment violated his right to free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment, and his right to due process guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.
The harassment included
- Submitting him to heightened scrutiny under “professionalism” standards,
- Arbitrarily and capriciously awarding [him] failing grades,
- His removal from the ULSOM for (a) expressing his pro-life and religious views … and (b) verbally expressing his concerns regarding his … treatment within the medical school.
In addition, the suit complained that “the defendants [including the president, the dean, and the provost] punished Clark for expressing his views regarding … abortion and the sanctity of life … when there were [other] students who … are not subject to the same or similar restrictions, or such severe level of academic discipline as applied to Clark.”
Clark entered the school in the fall of 2016. In his second year, as head of the Students for Life (SFL) chapter on campus, he invited a pro-life speaker to address students. The school tried to quash the event by charging outrageous “security” fees for the event but was rebuffed when The Alliance for Defending Freedom entered the fray.
Ever since then, according to Clark, the faculty had it in for him. He claimed that one Dr. Thomas Neely, an OB-GYN instructor, attacked his intelligence, calling him “stupid” and questioning whether his “brain was working.” Clark claimed that he “was physically harassed and bullied” as well.
The suit asks the court to force ULSOM to reinstate Clark in good standing, give him academic eligibility with the school, purge his student file of negative references to his religious beliefs and activities, and to award him damages and attorneys’ fees.
Upon close inspection, Clark is tangling with a tiger. ULSOM, despite its façade of providing medical training, is in fact Kentucky’s only abortion provider, skirting the state’s laws against public funding of the practice.
One of its instructors, Dr. Ernest Marshall, owns an abortion provider, the EMW Women’s Surgical Center. Two of the school’s instructors perform some 3,600 abortions through EMW, generating an estimated $2.5 to $3 million annually to ULSOM.
Since its affiliation with the abortion provider in 2011, instructors at ULSOM have performed between 25,000 and 30,000 abortions.
As The Family Foundation reported: “The purpose … is to provide abortions and train abortionists in universities located in states that do not allow public funding for abortions. In other words, they come alongside a university and provide a relationship that circumvents the spirit of the state law.” It added: ULSOM “is a part of the supply chain for creating abortionists.”
During an interview in 2020, Family Foundation spokesman Martin Cothran said:
The only remaining abortion clinic in Kentucky is being run as an official or quasi-official arm of the University of Kentucky’s Medical School….
Not only is U of L involved in the abortion clinic’s activities, the clinic operates, for all practical purposes, as an extension of the Medical School’s program.
This is the tiger that Clark is tangling with: an outfit that generates millions of dollars annually for murdering tens of thousands of pre-born infants. Clark is not only threatening the culture of infanticide at ULSOM but also its funding.
It is hoped that all of this is brought out when the court examines Clark’s complaint and seeks the response from ULSOM.
