ARTICLES

Fertility Is Not a Disease

OAKLAND OB-GYN ENDS UP ON THE NARROW PATH

By George Neumayr

Mary Davenport is an unlikely defender of the Church's teaching on birth control. For one thing, she is not Catholic. For another, she once facilitated the sexual revolution.

But now Davenport, a member of the Orthodox faith, says what many Catholic doctors fear to say: "Contraception does translate into not really working with your fertility and regarding the baby as a disease or an unwanted thing....Fertility is not a disease and we should learn how to live with our fertility."

Such comments represent a dramatic reversal for Davenport. In 1969, she graduated from Smith College in Massachussetts, eager to advance the sexual revolution through a career in medicine:

"I was not a Christian at that point; I was an agnostic....My father died when I was eight years old and I think that influenced my world view for a very long time until I was about 40 years old. I read the Kinsey report. I think I was sympathetic to the view that sexual repression was bad....I think I believed in the lie that it would be good for people to have more sexual freedom and sexual expression. I had no idea what that was going to bring later on....

"I would have to say I was a true believer in [the sexual revolution]. It even affected my decision to go into obstetrics and gynecology. There weren't very many women in ob-gyn at that time and so I wanted to go into women's health and was interested in making contraception and even abortion more widely available...."

This Davenport did--though not without a few reservations along the way. In 1976, after graduating from Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston and finishing an internship at Virginia Mason Hospital in Seattle, Davenport began a residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at the UC San Diego medical school, where, she says, "I did some mid-trimester abortions." Late-term abortion, however, was a bridge too far, as advances in neonatology had revealed to her its particularly grisly nature: "Actually, on immediately being exposed to this the residents started protesting and I helped initiate that....We didn't believe in doing them after viability and we were shocked that there would be some overlap....It was shocking even to us." [UC San Diego relented on the issue at that time, though, as Davenport notes, the residents still "would end up delivering the dead fetuses--but we wouldn't be initiating."]

Then in 1980, Davenport joined the Kaiser Hospital System in Portland, where, believing "that after viability [the child] was human and before viability it wasn't," she performed some more abortions. But her concerns had begun to multiply, not least because of Kaiser's astonishingly high abortion volume: "In Portland, Oregon when I was at Kaiser I began to have more qualms [where] a third of the pregnancies were aborted....Women would come in and have their pregancy tests and they would call up for the results the next day. And the people who answered the phone were trained to say, 'Are you going to continue or terminate?'"

Fearing that "it was hard to get a job in a group without doing abortions (or I thought it was)" and accepting a colleague's rationalization that "if you don't do them, other people are going to do them," Davenport reluctantly continued to perform a few abortions when she moved to the Bay Area in 1983, joining the Highland Hospital staff in Oakland.

Finally in 1984 the qualms outweighed the claims of expediency and she abandoned abortion for good, citing as reasons the undeniably "repulsive" character of it and the moral witness of Mother Teresa:

"The thing that convinced me to stop was, well, some of it was really confronting what I was doing at a spiritual level and realizing that it was wrong and that it had consequences for me. And also I felt awful doing it and, you know, ultrasound was becoming now more developed in the '80s. There was more of an awareness of what I was really doing. It really was a person and not a pre-person.... I know the pro-abortion people say that the reason more physicians don't do abortions is because they are afraid of retaliation from the [ideological] right or violence to themselves, but it is really because it is a repulsive procedure....

"And I think Mother Teresa had an effect on me....I came across (at this point I was not a Christian and I was involved in Buddhism for some time, but she was actually at a conference called the International Transpersonal Psychology conference in Bombay, India in 1982) ...some of her testimony....Her testimony there really touched me. It was very, very powerful about abortion being killing....It was one of the major things that convinced me that I should not be doing it."

The decision meant "I had to go into private practice because I really wanted to separate myself out from it," says Davenport. "In the Oakland/Berkeley area it was one of the higher abortion rate areas.... Most of the physicians around here do [abortions]."

But Davenport at that point didn't even identify contraception as a moral issue. It wasn't until 1992 when she came into contact with inspiring, "non-contracepting" evangelical patients that she considered contraception's moral implications.

But could she dispense with contraceptive prescription and survive as an ob-gyn? She wondered: "For my practice a very large percentage was contraception. So it was very difficult for me to conclude giving it up.....What would I do if I couldn't do that?....Because I hadn't known anyone in the whole United States who was an ob-gyn who didn't prescribe contraceptives....I was concerned I would have to retrain. Would I have to do something else?"

Again, nagging moral worries diverted her from the easy path. "I had some sense from Scripture after becoming a Christian [in 1988] that contraception was wrong.... [But] the thing that bothered me the most had to do with unmarried women and facilitating their lifestyle...."

Moreover, she discovered through association with down-the-line pro-life Catholic ob-gyns at the Pope Paul VI Institute in Omaha, Nebraska (where Davenport is training to be a NFP consultant), that Natural Family Planning is more effective than dangerous birth control devices and that "giving it all up [both abortion and birth control]" was possible: "I had no idea [NFP] worked so well.....I think even now ob-gyns and family practice physicians in their residencies don't get good information on Natural Family Planning and how good it is and how well it works. They are really misinformed about it and it is confused with the rhythm method which doesn't work very well...."

"The Creighton method has a 98-99 percent success rate if it is used correctly....If that didn't exist that would have been more of a dilemma for me...

"[Natural Family Planning] came up with the pro-life ob-gyns. I came to really appreciate the contribution of Catholics to the pro-life movement and their role in it and the connection between contraception and abortion....I think [for] the majority of people if they are using contraception it is too much of a temptation to be greedy or to be lazy in your relationship with your spouse; to not put God first in your life, maybe to be selfish. And inherent in Natural Family Planning there are relational, interactional things that are incredibly helpful in a marriage....A lot of people have become desensitized to the gravity of interfering with the creation of a human being [which] was regarded universally as a grave sin I know by all Christians until 1930 and there were laws in all of the states against it."

Now Davenport, who, along with her partner, sees 300 patients a month, brings Natural Family Planning "up with almost every potential person I see." She says "if I am seeing them and they are on something else I expose them to books and charts, so every person who is passing through my door who is on some form of contraception will know about it."

Their reaction? "Well, some of them are really intrigued, a few get mad....It was easier than I thought.... Some are thrilled. Like me, they had heard a lot of false things about it. They thought it didn't work or confused it with the rhythm method or didn't know it got up to an effectiveness in the latest studies at 99 percent."

TOP