Paul Tuns, Review:
Abortion Pill Reversal: A Second Chance at Choice edited by George Delgado (Ignatius Press, $19.95, 254 pages)
There is no better person to edit a collection of testimonials about Abortion Pill Reversal (APR) that its creator, Dr. George Delgado. In Abortion Pill Reversal: A Second Chance at Choice, Delgado describes how he came about inventing the “game changer” that gives women who have taken the abortion pill a chance to change their mind and attempt to save the life of their preborn children, how the “Medical-Abortion Complex” fought against this treatment that actually respects women’s choices by allowing them to change their mind, and APR has spread around the world. That is the first third of the book and Delgado’s story is one that needs to be told. In the remaining part of the book, he collects testimonials from women who changed their mind about taking the abortion pill and the medical professionals who have facilitated APR for these women. Their stories are also important.
In 2008, eight years after RU-486 (as it was then called) was approved in the United States, Delgado received an inquiry from a pro-life sidewalk counselor seeking assistance for a woman who changed her mind and wanted to reverse a chemical abortion. He had not heard of any such process to help the woman who changed her mind after starting the abortion pill regiment. He set the woman up with a physician trained in Natural Procreative (NaPro) Technology, guessing, along with Dr. Thomas Hilgers, that progesterone might counter the abortifacient drug. Dr. Jonnalyn Belocura agreed to take on the patient and the mother delivered a healthy girl. Two years later, the woman sent a picture of her child with a simple message: “Thank you, Dr. Delgado.” The progesterone countered the abortifacient drug, which operates by making the uterine lining inhospitable to embryonic life.
Over the next few years, Delgado received more requests to aid women who wanted to reverse the effects of the abortion pill. He had not set out to become a researcher or an activist, but God had other plans for him, as he admits in his introduction. He would collaborate with Dr. Mary Davenport of San Francisco – he was practicing in San Diego – to develop a protocol for abortion pill reversal, which he sought to add to the medical literature on chemical abortions. He would launch the Abortion Pill Reversal Network in 2012, a movement that has spread globally to Australia, Canada, Colombia, Mexico, Russia, and elsewhere. A website was created to inform women of APR and a hotline was created to link women who ingested the abortion pill with local physicians who could help them. Noting that “Willie Sutton said he robbed banks because that’s where the money is,” Delgado began recruiting doctors from pro-life organizations, and today there are more than 1400 doctors aiding the effort. He began publishing case studies in medical journals.
Although APR is not always successful, if taken early enough after taking the first pill of the two-pill abortion drug regiment, more than half the babies will survive.
Delgado describes the Medical-Abortion Complex’s pro-abortion agenda, often supported by governments and professional bodies, and how that complex misrepresents the abortion pill as irreversible, and APR as unsafe and (hypocritically) a violation of a woman’s choice to have an abortion. He has major hurdles to reach his ultimate goal which is to move APR from pregnancy care centres and a handful of emergency care doctors to a future where “women seeking a second chance at choice will simply call their primary physician or ob-gyn or visit the nearest emergency department to start the process.”
For now, doctors who help women who have changed their mind are ostracized. Dr. Dermot Kearney in the United Kingdom was attacked (without merit) for allegedly brainwashing a woman he helped and offering financial inducements to change her mind. While he was eventually exonerated, Kearney had restrictions placed on his ability to practice medicine; he was literally prevented from saving lives. Kearney recalls the persecution he faced, including the hypocrisy of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, which said it did not support the use of off-label medications, and that progesterone was not licensed for APR. The RCOG was hypocritical because it supports the use of misoprostol as the second drug used in chemical abortions, despite it not being licensed for use in abortion.
Kearney calls APR a “rescue treatment” and the figures support that characterization. Kearney says that taking the abortion pill results in the death of the child between 80 and 98 per cent of the time, but when a woman takes mifepristone (the first pill in the abortion protocol) and then commences “high-dose progesterone … promptly and continues the treatment for at least two weeks, there is a 50-55 per cent chance that her baby will survive to birth.” Kearny observes, “there are very few interventions in medicine whereby a certain mortality rate of 80 per cent can be consistently reduced to less than 50 per cent mortality rate by the application or administration of a simple, inexpensive medical treatment.” Kearney celebrates APR as “one of the great advances in medicine over the last 50 years,” which is why we call for Dr. Delgado to receive the Nobel Prize for Medicine elsewhere in this issue.
The testimonials of several women included in the book indicate that some women who take the abortion pill almost instantly regret their decision and want a second chance at choice, yet receive no help from the abortion industry that fed them poisonous pills to kill their preborn children. Due to the heroic efforts of pro-life medical networks and APR, they receive the support they need to change their minds and give birth to their sons and daughters.
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