ARTICLES

A Tweak of the Conscience

HUMANAE VITAE MOTIVATES LOCAL M.D. TO ALTER PRACTICE

By George Neumayr

Humanae Vitae, the 30-year-old papal document condemning artificial birth control, continues to move Catholics of conscience. Dr. George Delgado, a Catholic family physician in Benicia, knows this well. He recently quit the practice of prescribing (and referring for) artificial birth control and credits Humanae Vitae with changing his mind.

"All Catholics should really read and pray upon and meditate upon Humanae Vitae," says Delgado. "It makes more sense every day...I realize more the beauty of the whole design of human sexuality. It is an awesome work of art that God has given us."

Delgado's change of policy, which began he says about a year and a half ago, had immediate implicatons for his seven-year practice. Two associates decided to leave, after Delgado gave them fair warning that "the entire office would be Natural Family Planning-only." He is now recruiting for replacements.

Delgado also informed his patients of his decision, sending, he says, "a letter to all of the women [600-1000] in my practice ages 18-45 announcing the change in my practice that there would no longer be any prescriptions or referrals for contraceptives or sterilization." In the letter, Delgado says that in the letter he "cited the Physicians' Desk Reference explaining the abortifacient potential of the birth control pill."

Naturally, controversy followed. One of Delgado's patients faxed the letter to the Benicia Herald, turning it into a July front-page story. "That generated lots of letters to the editor and lots of letters to me personally and phone calls," says Delgado. "As far as the letters and phone calls I got [they] were about 2 to 1 in favor, very strongly in favor, of what I had done."

Only "25 patients," according to Delgado, have left his practice, while "the number of new patients hasn't changed... and one or two have said that they definitely came because of this."

Delgado sees in this episode a lesson for the Church: "Priests think they are going to hurt people's feelings and they are afraid people aren't going to listen. My experience is that people want to hear the truth and our really hungry for the truth. If priests start addressing these issues they will see that...They will get a lot of positive reinforcement."

Delgado takes full responsibility, he says, for all his "actions and the sins I have committed," but wishes that the Church had confronted him on issues of medical ethics earlier. Before attending medical school at UC Davis, Delgado attended St. Mary's, a Christian Brothers college in Moraga, where "the science was very good," but "they didn't present the [Church's] teachings faithfully." This, he thinks, fed into his "rationalization" to follow the medical crowd on the issue of contraception.

"I think that it is unfortunate that priests don't know the kind of influence they could have. When my wife and I got married the priest we conferred with for our pre-marital counseling gave his approval to use contraception. That definitely had a negative impact."

"I was in a fog of denial, ignorance and rationalization," Delgado says, describing his thinking before embracing the Church's teachings fully. At first, he pushed "the [contraceptive] issue aside and never dealt with it," he says. "All through medical school and training I was able to avoid prescribing contraception...There was always someone around who could do it for me sort of...That was very convenient and kind of kept my conscience clear."

Then, under pressure to jumpstart his practice, he made "a decision of expendiency." "I felt I couldn't alienate any patients...I knew about the abortifacient possiblity of birth control pills but in my mind I rationalized it [--] that I didn't have a lot of hard evidence...It just became part of the routine."

But "there were times when there was a little tweak of the conscience." Delgado could see that contraception fostered an attitude of "not being open to life and God's will." He remembers patients "trying to micromanage their lives, trying to conceive in two-month windows, and deliver in a certain time and get back to work in six weeks."

Now Delgado believes what he once doubted: that the connection between abortion and artificial birth control is real. "That's crystal clear to me now...." He agrees that abortions will continue as long as birth control devices do: "I think so...The distinction is really blurred with these contraceptive pills and then RU-486 and these so-called Morning After pills. Even the Supreme Court has stated in an opinion in the past that a society that has contraceptives must as a necessity have abortion as a back-up, [that] if there is contraceptive failure, there must be a backup..I think they are very much intertwined."

Delgado is grateful to One More Soul, a national group of doctors in total compliance with the teachings of the Church, and Dr. John Haas, an occasional columnist for the National Catholic Register, for impressing the Church's integrated approach to medical ethics upon him.

He had wanted to join One More Soul, but discovered he couldn't answer some of its questions adequately, like, "Do you refer for contraception? Do you refer for sterilization?" "That really made me say, there is a reason I want to be in this book and there is a reason why I am not in this book now...That really convinced me that that there is really only one way to go."

"I also had some correspondence via e-mail with Dr. John Haas...He was a very good witness for me. I wrote to him and told him what my dilemma was. He listened, but just told me what I needed to hear, which was the truth. He didn't pussyfoot around. He gave it to me straight...I knew I had to right all the wrongs I had done."

Delgado hopes to form an alliance with Dr. Mary Davenport, an Oakland ob-gyn (profiled in the March Faith), to share a doctor who could work within an "NFP-only system." Davenport "has graciously volunteered to help me in my office until I recruit staff," he says. "I want to redirect my practice in a way more like a ministry than a medical practice.

"Like Mother Teresa says, God calls us to be faithful, not successful. We always have to remember that."

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