By Daniel James Devine
Nineteen years old and pregnant, Cynthia Galvan had an abortion pill in her mouth and turmoil in her soul. She was unmarried and felt unprepared for motherhood.
A medical abortion was the solution. The day before Galvan had ingested the first drug in the RU-486 regimen, mifepristone, intended to detach the embryo from the uterus. Now she was taking a misoprostol pill, which would cause her body to expel the baby.
Yet she doubted. Her mother was in tears over her decision, and a local pro-life doctor told Galvan over the phone he might be able to reverse the effects of the prior day’s pill.
A call to Planned Parenthood’s staff suggested the opposite: The baby was already dead, they assured her—or if not, it would be born with major birth defects. They warned that unless she took the second drug to expel the pregnancy now, she could experience severe pain.
Galvan spit the pill out, unsure who to believe.
At the time, the doctor she had spoken to, George Delgado, was one of the only people in the world who could have helped her. Delgado is the medical director of Culture of Life Family Services, a Catholic family healthcare clinic and crisis pregnancy center in San Diego. One of the world’s few doctors with experience reversing a medical abortion, Delgado uses injections of the pregnancy hormone progesterone as an antidote to the mifepristone abortion drug. Today he’s building a network of pro-life doctors willing to perform this novel abortion reversal technique for women who second-guess their decision to take RU-486.
Read more at http://www.worldmag.com/2013/04/cynthias_choice