In 2008, Dr. George Delgado, a family physician in San Diego County, received a phone call from a pro-life sidewalk counselor, Terry Palmquist, explaining that a woman in Texas had asked her for help after starting a chemical abortion using mifepristone. The woman had changed her mind and wanted desperately to know whether the abortion could be stopped.

In response to Terry’s request for a solution, Dr. Delgado wracked his brain. Then he asked Dr. Thomas Hilgers at the Saint Paul VI Institute in San Francisco to comment on the possibility of combatting the mifepristone with progesterone. Heartened by the response, Delgado arranged with a Texas physician, Jonnalyn Belocura, who was trained in Natural Procreative (NaPro) technology, and who was willing to take the pregnant woman on as a patient to attempt to block the abortifacient chemicals and thwart the abortion.

From a distance, Dr. Delgado monitored the effort to save the baby by reversing the ability of the mother’s body to absorb the poison, and the mother delivered a healthy girl at full term. Eighteen months later, the ecstatic mom sent him a photo of her precious toddler with the inscription, “Thank you, Dr. Delgado.”

Over the next two years, Dr. Delgado received an increasing number of phone calls from clinics and doctors attempting to help other women who wished to stop the process of chemical abortion before it was too late. In 2011, he worked with Dr. Mary Davenport in the San Francisco Bay Area to help another woman to stop her chemical abortion. This attempt was unsuccessful, but the two doctors decided to collaborate in writing up a protocol for abortion pill reversal to be added to the available medical literature.

With more and more requests for help coming in, Dr. Delgado also launched a network called Abortion Pill Reversal in 2012, with the support of the non-profit pro-life organization Culture of Life Family Services in Escondido, California (also in San Diego County).

Dr. Delgado initially thought he was the first to figure out how to reverse the process of chemical abortion to save a baby’s life, but he later learned that Dr. Matthew Harrison had effected a reversal of mifepristone abortion in North Carolina in 2006. In any case, through Dr. Delgado’s determination to make this possibility better known, many more courageous women have fought to reverse their attempts to chemically abort their babies.

The bottom line at the present time is this: While the efforts to challenge the fast-tracked approval of chemical abortion in the United States and elsewhere have not been successful (and will likely never be successful in the current moral climate), the options for women to reverse the process of chemical abortion if they change their minds have expanded rapidly around the world. Interest and availability is growing in Australia, Mexico, Russia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Lithuania, Colombia and elsewhere, as described in Dr. Delgado’s book Abortion Pill Reversal: A Second Chance at Choice, published this year by Ignatius Press….

By Jeff Mirus on Catholic Culture