Dr John Bruchalski is an obstetrician and gynecologist who was once an abortionist. He lives in Virginia in the United States, where his Tepeyac Family Center operates as a pro-life haven for mothers in crisis pregnancies. “Children are not STDs”, says Dr Bruchalski in an interview with Public Discourse.

Working as a gynecologist, Dr Bruchalski’s conscience began to conflict with abortion, which he found difficult to reconcile with his calling as a life-affirming doctor.

Dr Bruchalski has recounted how, on one occasion, a mom begged him to save her unborn baby at 22 weeks, while, in another room, a mother desperately wanted him to abort her baby.

“She’s like, ‘No, just get rid of it.’ And what did I do?”, recalls Dr Bruchalski.

For him, the “dissonance” between two conflicting acts he was being asked to perform was becoming increasingly troubling.

In the latter case, Dr Bruchalski broke the mother’s waters – and the baby was “born alive”. But since the baby was just over five grams over the legal limit for abortion, the law required that the medical staff keep the baby alive.

“This baby weighed about a pound and a quarter. Its skin was translucent. It made noise, it was obviously human, part of our family. But the dissonance is: no, call it a fetus, it’s not wanted… Society doesn’t want it”, reflects Dr Bruchalski.

“A dark side to medicine”

A fellow doctor told John to stop “treating my patients as tumors”.

And Dr Bruchalski warns that, certainly, “there’s a dark side to medicine that you really have to be careful about…

“I’m convinced it’s like the train platform at Auschwitz-Birkenau. You go here, you go there based on some line drawn between human and non-human. Some people are part of the human family and some are not…

“And that’s what happened that night when I tried to kill that baby.”

But Dr Bruchalski finally couldn’t unsee the life in front of him: “I later realized that if mom and dad give us the egg and sperm, it’s a human life. Period.”

“Medicine as mercy”

“I believe in alms-giving because it’s very connected to medicine as mercy”, says Dr Bruchalski, who also asserts that, “by collaborating in community, you can build a space where abortion becomes unwanted and children welcomed”.

“It’s very rewarding to practice excellent women’s health that is collaborative, integrated, holistic, and listens to their bodies”, Dr Bruchalski continues. “Fertility is something to be collaborated with rather than suppressed.”

Yet he also recognises the challenges of establishing a pro-life ethic in medicine that is still pro-abortion, and in which doctors are expected to provide abortion as a “service”, on demand and almost without question.

Dr Bruchalski recalls being asked by a fourth-year resident at a hospital whether he really believed “that life begins at fertilization, human life?” He replied: “Oh, yeah. And it deserves our care.” The resident said: “You’re the first person in twelve years of my academic training ever to have said that.”

An “inspiring” conversion story

SPUC’s Michael Robinson, Executive Director (Public Affairs and Legal Services), said: “Dr John Bruchalski’s conversion story is inspiring as well as revealing. There is, indeed, a troubling side to medicine that Dr Bruchalski saw, rejected and now warns about.

“It is clear that medicine has a long way to go to recognise unborn lives as lives with inherent humanity – each being a life that deserves protection.

“The arbitrary drawing of lines, deciding who gets to live and who gets to die, is profoundly dangerous in any society, and has often led to disaster. Whenever a human is classified coldly as somehow being inhuman, or a ‘fetus’, society is already on a slippery slope.

“But Dr Bruchalski shows that there is a way back, so long as men and women of good conscience see an unborn baby for what it really is – a life.”