The John-Henry Westen Show - Hidden SECRET Behind IVF： Doctor SPEAKS OUT!

00:00:00.000 She described me as taking the place of her husband. It stung. It really stung. And it

00:00:04.460 made me realize right then, I'm not doing this anymore.

00:00:09.780 My friends, in vitro fertilization is all in the news. And we're here at the Bring America Back

00:00:15.880 to Life conference. And yesterday, I heard a fascinating thing from a physician, from an OBGYN,

00:00:22.700 like with all the bona fides to speak to this issue about IVF. Even more fascinating, I thought,

00:00:30.000 was her conversion story from being on the other side of the pro-life argument to now being a

00:00:36.540 pro-lifer. So it's just stunning. And it's so rare to find someone who is an OBGYN who's not only

00:00:43.960 willing to say it, but actually willing to tell her story as well. Dr. Alicia Thompson, good to be with

00:00:48.520 you. John Henry, nice to meet you. Let's begin as we always do with the sign of the cross.

00:00:52.420 In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. So your story was super

00:00:58.720 fascinating when I heard it last night, as you just described so briefly, what you experienced.

00:01:04.560 But let's start off with IVF, because right now, IVF is being almost by both sides, because

00:01:10.160 I think most Catholics are confused by it. Often, you'll have a priest recommend it even

00:01:15.720 for people who are experiencing infertility. But tell us medically, what's the issue with in vitro

00:01:23.240 fertilization? So I think the most important thing to understand, it's not just IVF that I'm

00:01:28.720 going to talk about today and what I want to highlight, but it's actually an entire body of

00:01:33.660 medicine that's called assisted reproductive technology. So it's not just IVF, but it's other

00:01:38.240 technologies as well that are employed in order to help individuals build families, be that married

00:01:44.100 couples or women who want to be single mothers by choice or same-sex partnerships. These are the

00:01:51.060 technologies used to help build families. I think it's very confusing, because so many people look 0.85

00:01:57.380 at it as family building is beautiful. It's a good and noble goal to want to bring life into the world

00:02:03.620 and have a family. But they don't necessarily understand how it's being done and how it's being

00:02:08.740 employed. And so basically, IVF is creating human life and fertilizing eggs outside of the sexual act.

00:02:15.460 So they are effectively creating life in a lab. And the issue that is so important to shine a light

00:02:22.880 on is it's a very utilitarian practice. There's a lot of embryos that are created and typically less

00:02:29.180 than 10% and some say it's less than 5% are ever born in the next year. So it's a very kind of a

00:02:36.560 disturbing process on how many embryos are lost. It's unbelievable. There are all sorts of examples you

00:02:43.200 could give to this. But if most of them are dying, some of them are ending up in cryopreservation,

00:02:49.300 freezing forever and ever, and then thaw and die. But so even though it seems like so pro-life because

00:02:56.860 it's a baby, it's really pro-death when you're talking about nine children dead for every one that

00:03:03.480 you could get. Agreed. And I think the hard part is the incredible crisis of frozen embryos that we have

00:03:09.520 in the United States. And the way that we practice that in this country is different from other areas

00:03:15.880 in the Western world. So my goal, because there's so much disagreement in the pro-life movement on,

00:03:22.100 you know, is this a morally permissible thing to do or is it not? I think we can move past that

00:03:29.240 and allow people at this point, since we don't even know what's going on, to educate what's going on

00:03:34.780 and say, okay, well, we're all going to understand that it's happening. And right now we're moving in

00:03:39.100 a direction where there may actually be set aside for federal funds. I mean, even the conservative

00:03:43.080 movement is saying we're pro-IVF, we're for IVF. But to be able to say, okay, you can be for something,

00:03:49.560 but you should understand how it's being done and how it's being carried out so that we can have some

00:03:53.480 guardrails, some very common sense guardrails in order to make this something that, you know,

00:03:59.220 quite honestly, is not so destructive to human life because it can be done better than it is now,

00:04:04.440 even if you fundamentally disagree with IVF as a process, you can do it in a way that's better

00:04:09.560 than it's being done now. There is medical intervention that can help that has nothing

00:04:16.420 to do with assisted reproductive technology in the bad way. That's about NAPR technology, about 0.96

00:04:22.800 there are sometimes the need for physical intervention that can help too. That's all legit by

00:04:29.020 the church as well. Absolutely. One of the things that's important to know fundamentally is that

00:04:33.720 research follows money. And since IVF came about in the 1970s, there's a lot of money in it, lots of

00:04:40.240 research in it. And unfortunately, about 30% of couples who experience infertility have an unexplained

00:04:45.360 diagnosis. That's extraordinarily unsettling to people. They don't understand why they are not

00:04:50.420 fundamentally able to get pregnant the way that most people can. And they don't understand why. 0.99

00:04:55.720 Even if you cannot resolve the problem, the understanding of, well, why is it happening to begin with

00:05:01.440 is very unsettling? Because if you don't know why it's happening, how are you treating it? And are you

00:05:06.300 treating it in a way that's restoring fertility or in a way that kind of bypasses fertility? And praise God

00:05:11.700 that for many years now, we have had a really an explosion in what I would call restorative reproductive

00:05:16.940 medicine, including NAPR technology, FEM, which is a fertility education and medical management, which has an

00:05:23.220 entire research arm called RHRI, the Marquette method. There are now specialists, which didn't even exist 10 years ago,

00:05:30.180 on reproductive immunology, understanding how the immune system is playing a role. And this is just

00:05:35.260 all opening up the field so that you're not just left with, don't do this over here and then do

00:05:41.240 nothing. I don't think we should be a culture that says, don't do IVF, but then not make anything else

00:05:46.220 available to these couples who are suffering. They're very much suffering. And I thank God every day that

00:05:51.720 this is really a horizon that is just coming broad open in front of us.

00:05:56.680 It's beautiful that this is happening. You said something very interesting about the funding,

00:06:02.260 the money, because as we just saw with the whole pharmaceutical industry and its horrors over the

00:06:08.040 last little while, that's just being exposed now. That's a huge deal that I think most people were

00:06:13.960 completely blind to. But you see that's happening in the IVF sphere specifically.

00:06:18.800 Yes, but that's because of the incredible amount of money that's just going into it directly.

00:06:23.140 So IVF is, in many states, not covered by insurance. So people are just paying out lots

00:06:29.880 and lots of money. And because the goal of IVF is a take-home baby rate, right? They want these 0.87

00:06:36.220 couples to be able to take home a baby. There is lots of experimentation done, regulation, meaning like,

00:06:42.760 okay, can we improve freezing rates? How can we make this better? And so there's lots of head-to-head

00:06:48.340 protocols that come up in this field that is funded by, you know, the companies that make the

00:06:53.660 medications or that the couples themselves are willing to participate in. So they're just generating

00:06:58.440 a lot of data. Conversely, OB-GYNs like myself, we're just community OB-GYNs. We're not working in

00:07:04.520 academic centers. We are not using very expensive medications for most of our patients. It's hard to

00:07:09.900 get in and do big research protocols. You know, quite frankly, I don't see thousands of patients

00:07:15.000 coming through every year for infertility. I don't have that kind of money coming into my office. The

00:07:19.180 patients generally aren't paying for that. It's an insurance-covered thing. So it's just harder to

00:07:23.280 compete with generating data. It does happen. You know, Phil Boyle, who does these over in Ireland,

00:07:30.420 he does neofertility. He publishes a lot. Again, RHRI publishes a lot. So we do have people that are

00:07:37.100 doing it, but it's just a much smaller cohort of people generating the data against this huge industry.

00:07:41.540 One way especially that I think it's fascinating is that the methods that are proposed that are

00:07:49.700 licit according to the church, but also according to just a plain old plan of God. I mean, he intended

00:07:55.000 every child to come into this world by the loving sexual union of a husband and wife. And so

00:08:00.340 that kind of procreation still honors that. A lot of them are natural, this big move toward

00:08:09.080 being more natural and non-invasive and don't take drugs. There's a lot of natural ways that

00:08:14.440 they're doing it. Agreed. I used to have a lot of patients who were coming to me through

00:08:18.640 religious reason, but I have patients that come to me because like, as you said, they don't

00:08:23.760 necessarily want to eat it. I joke, but I'm like, they don't want to eat an egg that came from a

00:08:27.700 chicken that was given hormones and, or they failed IVF. And so they're, you know, not just with

00:08:33.340 IVF generally, but also women's health. Generally, we have seen a really remarkable explosion in what

00:08:39.300 I would call fertility awareness-based methods of family planning, where women are starting to

00:08:43.560 recognize that fertility is beautiful. It's part of our, how our bodies work to hold normal

00:08:49.800 ovulation and our cycles as a gold standard for reproductive health. Reproductive health in women

00:08:56.260 is very complicated. The, how hard it is to generate an egg, um, the, the hormonal processes

00:09:01.760 involved there, the incredible number of ways that you can have disruption in that, that we are able

00:09:06.920 to now, what somebody has described as like unleashing the cycle. You should be using the menstrual cycle 0.99

00:09:12.800 as a vital sign. And then when you use it as a vital sign, you can recognize there are problems.

00:09:16.860 And then you can use those, uh, things that women are noticing and bringing to you. Like this is 1.00

00:09:22.180 happening. I'm bleeding abnormally. I have long cycles. I'm having a lot of pain. I'm not noticing

00:09:27.200 a good, um, like a mucus pattern, which we use as a sign of fertility. And we can really hone in

00:09:31.700 on what's going on, what could be causing this disruption and give us an area of where we can

00:09:36.040 dig deeper to figure out why these things are happening. Even apart from getting pregnant, 0.85

00:09:41.080 I very much want to distill down that women's reproductive health does not distill down to, 0.96

00:09:46.440 do you want to make a baby or do you not? Because ovulation is good. It's good. That's what

00:09:50.780 we're designed to do. And it's, um, I think always a little bizarre to me that we're just so ready to

00:09:56.320 turn off female gonads. You know, that's what we are doing when we're disrupting ovulation. We're 0.99

00:10:00.600 just turning them off. And I just, um, I'm grateful to see that so many people are interested in not

00:10:06.020 doing that to allow the body to function as God designed it. That part of it's so fascinating

00:10:10.900 because as you were saying, it's not just about pregnancy or avoiding pregnancy. It's about general

00:10:15.740 health and it's health in ways I think that are still, we're still tapping into because, uh, I know

00:10:22.760 with my own, my two daughters and, and one of them went for this testing to, and it amazingly helped

00:10:30.580 her health. And it's not about getting pregnant. She's, she's not married yet, which is nothing,

00:10:34.220 but it's about getting her cycles under control and, and massive headaches. And it's amazing what it's

00:10:42.000 done because it's like this whole field of health that it's sort of off the charts from regular

00:10:47.360 medicine. So you feel like, what am I going to here? But our faith connection helped it, but it's

00:10:52.520 a real science, but it's so ignored. It's so pushed down that people don't hear about it. And I'm hoping

00:10:57.500 and I'm thinking that once this gets explored more as it is, praise God, um, we might find all sorts

00:11:03.080 of health benefits from this. I agree with you. Um, there's been an explosion in apps, you know,

00:11:08.640 so many things are, we like to focus a lot of sometimes on the negatives of the digital world,

00:11:12.720 but there is so many positives. There are apps, there are temperature devices that you can use.

00:11:17.360 There are hormone testing kits that you can do at home to check your, um, urinary hormones, um,

00:11:24.340 that can really make readily available to women and even girls, what is going on in the body? 0.98

00:11:30.480 Can I determine what's happening? Why am I experiencing this? So much of what women can 1.00

00:11:35.300 suffer and experience can be dependent on your hormonal phase. You know, men, your fertility 0.83

00:11:40.880 is pretty much the same minute to minute, to minute, to minute for women, you get a very 1.00

00:11:45.080 remarkable hormonal changes depending on the portion of the cycle you're in. So when women 1.00

00:11:50.700 come in and say things to me like, Oh, well I'm having headaches or I'm having GI disturbances,

00:11:56.480 you know, gastrointestinal disturbances, or they're having mood changes. If they give me a chart

00:12:02.660 and they show me where it's happening, I can at least to some degree hone in on,

00:12:08.960 is this hormonally dependent? If so, what's going on and can I help improve it? And it really opens

00:12:15.500 up such a broad variety of suffering to be improved upon because these hormones are not just affecting

00:12:21.760 your ovaries. You know, this is actually the hypothalamus, the pituitary, the ovaries,

00:12:26.620 the adrenal glands, and there are these hormones affect your whole body. They really do. Um, you know,

00:12:31.780 people like to oversee that, but it really does. It can change so much and you can improve so much

00:12:36.460 if you just know what's going on. Let's get into those improvements in more layman's terms because

00:12:41.100 I think that's going to be super fascinating for people. So my daughter, one of the things I noticed

00:12:46.140 was that mood changes were like actually apparent after simple treatments, natural treatments. It was

00:12:54.560 eating treatment. Like it was so simple and yet it was so foreign before they call it allopathic

00:13:01.180 medicine was just take drugs. You're going to, you know, you have these massive headaches, take,

00:13:05.320 take, take drugs. She took so many at one point that she had an ulcer from taking this. And yet

00:13:11.460 there's this unbelievable way of doing it, but it's, it's so foreign that it's almost like you feel like

00:13:19.300 it's a voodoo doctor. What are we doing? But yet it's there and it's being suppressed. And that's,

00:13:24.420 I'm so happy to hear that it's coming to the fore finally.

00:13:26.920 Yes. It's been excellent. I, um, some of the things that I see particularly with mood and I

00:13:31.460 see this a lot, for example, with perimenopausal women, women who are coming into the end of their 1.00

00:13:35.240 reproductive years, we can have sharp changes in hormonal fluctuations. And I give this example

00:13:41.240 around the third day of a woman's cycle, her period beginning, her estrogen level, maybe a 30 to a 50.

00:13:47.360 And the time that she goes to ovulate, it'll go to 250 to 400. That generally is a period where women 1.00

00:13:53.400 feel pretty good. They have good energy. They're more playful, more likely to flirt, um, those types

00:13:57.440 of things. But in perimenopause, that value can go not to 400, but to 800. And these are, this is

00:14:05.000 typically the time of a woman's cycle where she feels really good. And it's interesting in particular

00:14:09.340 NFP users are natural women who allow themselves to ovulate can find these very disturbing trends

00:14:15.620 that, and a part of their cycle that had always been very friendly to them. And so you can go in

00:14:20.660 and figure out why that's happening and explain to them why this may be happening, why it may be

00:14:24.480 normal, but also physiologic and see if you can improve it. Conversely, we can have women who are 1.00

00:14:29.720 young and the week leading before their period, it may not just be, you know, a little breast

00:14:34.000 tenderness or a little, you know, I'm a little bit more irritable, but really truly be overwhelmed

00:14:38.760 with their emotional changes, headaches. They can have GI changes. Um, they're getting very, um,

00:14:45.040 constipated loose stool, um, terrible pain where they can double over kind of curl up into a ball.

00:14:51.680 You can dig at that and try to understand like, why is this happening? There can be all sorts of

00:14:55.800 reasons. It can be progesterone abnormalities. They can be having a reflex to something called

00:15:00.700 prostaglandins that are released when the period begins. There's all sorts of things that you can

00:15:04.380 look at and improve upon without just saying, you know, the way to improve these cycle changes

00:15:10.420 you're having is to just shut it off. You know, that's really what has been the mainstay of

00:15:15.040 gynecologic health for 60 years. And interestingly, when I became an OBGYN, I was a pro-choice, didn't

00:15:24.740 know anybody that did natural family planning. That was like totally foreign to me. I received zero

00:15:29.040 lectures in my OBGYN residency on natural family planning. And it wasn't until I became a convert

00:15:34.820 that people would ask me, they just assumed as an OBGYN, I would know what natural family planning was,

00:15:39.740 that I would know a different way of practicing. To be direct, I lacked the courage initially for

00:15:45.160 many years, three years. I like to think of St. Paul going into Arabia for three years. Like, 0.96

00:15:49.720 I don't know what he was doing down there, but I'd like to think he was wrestling with God. And like,

00:15:52.760 what are you asking me to do? Because when I had the call to work in a different way,

00:15:55.900 to stop prescribing, stop tying tubes, I just didn't know if that was possible. I didn't know that

00:16:02.300 you could be an OBGYN and have a career and not practice the way that you were trained. And I

00:16:08.880 honestly didn't know there were other ways of doing it. There were treatments that had been

00:16:12.400 around for years that I just never was taught. Things like tranexamic acid, it's a medicine that's

00:16:17.500 really effective that's been around for 60 years, I think. And it slows menstrual blood by up to 70%

00:16:23.900 for women. It can lighten their periods without turning off their ovaries, which improves pain and 0.99

00:16:28.520 all sorts of other things. It can be a literal game changer for women. And it's really inexpensive. 0.96

00:16:32.460 It's widely available. And I never was taught to do it. I had never been taught in any way to

00:16:39.100 do what's called a restorative medicine. I never knew you could use a drug like dexamethasone,

00:16:44.700 for example, which is kind of getting in the weeds, but steroid hormones to improve

00:16:49.380 hormonal conditions that cause menstrual irregularity. I never taught any of that.

00:16:54.080 All I was taught was like, well, you know, take some NSAIDs, like take some Motrin,

00:16:58.160 take an Advil, you know, hydrate, or maybe use some birth control. And so I felt like I truly

00:17:03.820 had one hand, almost really both hands tied behind my back when people were asking me like,

00:17:08.240 but treat this without birth control. I was like, ooh. And over time, I was able to learn it. It's

00:17:13.040 available. You can look into it. And I just encourage people who are, you know, interested

00:17:18.080 in another way, it's available. You just have to keep looking.

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00:17:49.900 you for your support, and may God bless you.

00:17:52.320 Speaking personally, it was a miracle. My wife had three miscarriages after our seventh child.

00:18:00.120 Sometimes, you know, she knew we were supposed to have another child somehow. People thought she

00:18:03.840 was crazy because she was praying for another child, and we already had seven. The third

00:18:06.900 miscarriage, she was bleeding badly, and we had to go to emerge, and they sent us on to another

00:18:12.100 emergency hospital. It was very, very serious. It's very strange. The doctor, he was an abortionist

00:18:16.280 in another town, and he came in, and he said, because we'd asked for the body of the baby,

00:18:22.460 and he said, no, it's biomedical waste. We're not going to give it to you. This is not a body

00:18:26.300 of a baby. It's a biomedical waste. We're not going to give it to you. And anyway, that was really

00:18:29.820 disturbing. I said, you know, we're just going to leave and go to another place. He said, you're

00:18:34.440 going to have to sign to leave because you're going to kill your wife if you leave. So we ended up not

00:18:38.740 leaving and making a deal. And then he told my wife afterward, you need to come see me

00:18:44.820 about your options because you're never going to have another live child. And he was kind of

00:18:52.200 devastating for my wife. It was the worst bedside manner I've ever heard of. But after she prayed,

00:18:58.420 Lord, don't let him be your prophet. Like, anyway, we went to see a NAPRO doctor. They prescribed her 1.00

00:19:04.420 progesterone because they tested her and she was just super low in progesterone. I had heard this

00:19:09.680 before. So I asked the doctor who was telling us at the same time, at the time, I said, what about

00:19:15.740 progesterone? And he did this to me. He said, progesterone is one big fat zero. And when my wife

00:19:22.260 was, I think, like eight and a half months pregnant, she wanted to go back to the doctor and say,

00:19:27.060 here's your big fat zero. She didn't, of course, but tell us about progesterone because it's so

00:19:33.320 fascinating that I think most people have never heard of the thing, but for us, it was totally

00:19:37.740 miraculous. Progesterone is just an amazing hormone in typical cycles, meaning where women 1.00

00:19:42.980 are actually ovulating. It is made after the egg has been released. And it comes from the Greek 0.97

00:19:48.220 pro means you're four or something. And gestation is the four pregnancy hormone.

00:19:54.520 And so, isn't that interesting? Yeah. So really what it's doing is so once the egg is released,

00:20:01.060 the cyst that the egg was housed in collapses, and it's called a corpus luteum, that corpus luteum

00:20:06.440 creates progesterone. And this is one of those amazing things in God's providence. It will raise

00:20:12.740 your body temperature when you're making it. So not wildly, not that you're going to 103 or

00:20:18.680 anything, but it'll raise your temperature about half a degree up to one degree. So you can use that

00:20:22.600 as a marker of fertility. Are you getting a progesterone rise? Are you creating progesterone

00:20:27.780 after you've ovulated? Well, the progesterone kind of goes up almost in a bell curve, but not quite.

00:20:32.640 And the progesterone, what it's doing is I describe as almost like the mortar in the brick,

00:20:36.060 and it holds the line of the uterus together, stabilizes it, gives an increased blood flow to

00:20:41.900 allow embryos to come implant in the lining of the uterus for women. Many women can have 1.00

00:20:47.140 progesterone abnormalities. Now, the people on the other side will be like, not really. Is that real?

00:20:51.380 We don't know. Well, my entire residency, I was never taught what a normal progesterone value is

00:20:56.920 outside of this. And every OB-GYN would know it's like 15 or less or five or less. Those are the

00:21:02.140 numbers we're taught. I never was taught like how it goes up in pregnancy, what the normal variation is.

00:21:07.640 And the thing that's important is that particularly I see when in women who are older, what I generally,

00:21:13.340 this is an oversimplification, but your ability to ovulate an egg varies month to month, cycle to cycle.

00:21:20.020 One egg may be excellent and the next cycle may not be so good. And there can be a lot of hormonal

00:21:25.380 disturbances that can occur that prevent a good quality ovulation event, what I call a robust

00:21:31.360 ovulation event. That is more common in older women, women like myself. I don't have a cohort when I'm

00:21:37.880 ovulating of 20 eggs. I don't do that anymore. I'm an old lady. So I probably am recruiting from a

00:21:44.220 couple of eggs. And when you don't get good ovulation events, you should not therefore assume then

00:21:48.980 that the performance of that ovulation event is going to create excellent hormone downstream.

00:21:56.300 I would argue you shouldn't assume it. We know that ovulation struggles as we get older. That's

00:22:01.480 why miscarriage rates also go up when we get older. Well, because of that, you can check progesterone

00:22:07.660 every level if you want, or every cycle if you want. Or the other thing is you can just replace it.

00:22:12.320 If you show a progesterone abnormality that it doesn't get as high as it should, it drops very

00:22:18.180 precipitously, you can replace the progesterone. And this is called luteal phase, meaning post

00:22:23.840 ovulation progesterone support. Interestingly, it is progesterone receptors that is why birth control

00:22:30.340 pills work. Progesterone suppresses ovulation. That's really ultimately what it's doing. And when

00:22:35.660 you're replacing progesterone, interestingly, it doesn't turn off your body's making it. It just

00:22:40.380 adds to it. And while there's plenty of data that shows that it may not help, there is data that

00:22:47.640 shows it can help. And I have no data that shows that it hurts. So when we have something that can

00:22:53.920 be a positive or a neutral, but never really shows to be negative, and it is beneficial in pregnancy,

00:23:00.320 I do not understand why there's any pushback in giving it other than the argument which you could

00:23:05.880 make is, well, what if the woman didn't need it? You're giving her something she doesn't need.

00:23:10.740 Well, my argument there that I give back and I push back hard is what about prenatal vitamins,

00:23:16.300 right? There isn't a huge market for them. That's one of the most commonly asked questions I get on

00:23:21.020 new moms. It's like, Dr. Thompson, what prenatal vitamin should I be taking? There's so many,

00:23:25.080 I'm overwhelmed. And I usually say, hey, listen, if you went to the American College of OBGYNs,

00:23:29.760 and you pull up their algorithm on how you treat nausea and vomiting in pregnancy,

00:23:36.940 the first thing up the list is to stop prenatal vitamins, because it's so minimally

00:23:41.160 helpful. Once the baby's established, and you're having nausea and vomiting in pregnancy,

00:23:46.120 you don't even need to be on it. But I don't know any OBGYNs that don't recommend it. I don't know

00:23:50.700 any OBGYNs that don't offer it in their prenatal bags. And yet we get so much pushback on giving

00:23:55.440 progesterone. I don't know why. And I'm willing to die on that hill. Because as you,

00:23:59.760 you have seen in your own life, I've seen many, many, many couples who've benefited

00:24:03.860 from adding progesterone. Do I know for certain that was the one that did it? Well, no, because

00:24:10.460 I don't do a head to head trial. I don't say like, why don't we give this, you know, a duplicate of

00:24:15.540 your wife progesterone and another and the other one not and see what happens. It's just not you 0.83

00:24:20.560 can't do a head to head comparison. But I clinically have had lots of experience of it being positive,

00:24:24.560 just like you have seen in your own life. And I'm happy to do it.

00:24:27.220 It seems to me like one of the best kept secrets. But anyway, thank you for sharing all that. It's

00:24:33.740 truly fascinating for me. And I think for many people will be. But I'm also very fascinated in

00:24:38.620 your conversion story. Take us from you are a med student who is in favor of abortion. Take us from

00:24:47.960 there forward. You know, the most, I guess the most important background that I can share is that

00:24:52.360 I was raised in a purely secular home, and my father was in the military. So we moved just a

00:24:58.140 shocking number of times. So I never really was around anyone who mentored me in a faithful way.

00:25:02.880 I never knew my friends, parents to be faithful. And it just was never something that was a part of

00:25:07.740 my life. As I say, I like, I truly didn't know the Lord's Prayer until I was in my late 20s, which

00:25:13.200 people that are in the 70s, like what, you know, I really didn't. And when I was in my

00:25:19.760 medical school experience, I connected very well with OBGYN. I knew I wanted to do it. I

00:25:25.540 was selected into a military program to train. It was combined military and civilian. And I had

00:25:32.260 just planned, I was like, well, OBGYNs to abortions, that's what I'll do. And it wasn't until it came

00:25:39.000 time to decide at the time, praise God for this, praise God for this. It was an opt-in program, which

00:25:44.720 means our residencies did not have it automatically built into the schedule. But if that's something

00:25:49.740 you wanted to do, you needed to ask to do it. Now, something we need to push back on,

00:25:55.300 it's an opt-out program. It's supposed to be all residency programs are supposed to have it

00:25:59.640 automatically built in. And if you don't want to do it, you should say no in a way of normalizing

00:26:03.920 abortion training. So I was supposed to come up to this point where I needed to decide if I was going

00:26:09.240 to go to my program director and say, hey, listen, I want to go ahead and train in abortion. And I 0.65

00:26:14.400 thought I would do it. And interestingly, it was my clinical experience that changed me.

00:26:21.240 I would go into rooms with patients as a young doctor. And I say this very clearly,

00:26:30.000 you can read a room. Most of us can read a room. Like little kids can, but adults generally can read

00:26:34.240 a room. And I would go into a room and I would be able to tell that the woman in the room or girl,

00:26:39.380 oftentimes teenagers, was devastated to be pregnant. And sometimes they just wanted to know

00:26:46.760 if this pregnancy was viable. And that's how I would have said they want to know if they have

00:26:50.440 a viable pregnancy because they don't want to go trot themselves down to the abortion clinic and 0.89

00:26:53.940 shell out money when they can get a pregnancy confirmation, get on Medicaid, and then possibly

00:26:59.860 get a DNC for free, like a treatment for a miscarriage. So it was basically like, do I need to spend

00:27:04.860 the money for an abortion if this isn't a viable pregnancy? And so I could read the room and pick

00:27:09.340 up on it. And what I would do is I do these ultrasounds to determine viability, basically

00:27:13.920 just to say, is this human being alive or not? And I would never say human being. I would have

00:27:17.840 said a viable pregnancy because it's a state that I visualized as having to the woman. I didn't think 0.98

00:27:23.520 about or visualize the embryo in any way. I just thought about the woman in front of me suffering.

00:27:29.420 And so I would determine, I could tell she was suffering and devastated. And so when I do the

00:27:33.540 ultrasound, I turn the screen away, I would look and determine if there was a heartbeat or anything

00:27:38.080 like that. And I would say, oh, you know, viable or not viable. And I, you know, would just give the

00:27:43.140 news and move on and talk about options. Then I could go, you know, minutes later, hours later,

00:27:49.340 days later, I would go into another room and it was very similar, but you could read the room and it was

00:27:54.960 like tons of people in the room. They were totally pumped. They were so excited to be, you know, with this

00:27:59.840 woman and, you know, bringing out their phones, let's see the baby, let's see the baby. And it 0.91

00:28:04.400 could be the same gestational age, seven weeks, six weeks. And I, instead I would take that ultrasound

00:28:08.400 screen, turn it to them. I'd be like, look, there's your baby right there. And it was so exciting.

00:28:12.580 And truly prior to eight weeks was still an embryo. Um, you could see them little flex and extend their

00:28:19.160 bodies. It was crazy. I'm like, wow, look at that. Look, look at that. There's movement there. And

00:28:23.980 they'd be like, oh my goodness. The tears would come. And I, I was like, oh, you can't help,

00:28:28.140 but may move for those families who are so excited. And I would come out of the room and

00:28:31.940 we are taught these four big pillars of medical ethics, which is a beneficence do good for the

00:28:37.460 patient. Non-maleficence do no harm, um, autonomy and justice. The one that we talk about all the

00:28:45.240 time. I'm sure you can guess is autonomy. That's the only one that we talk about really. It's like

00:28:49.740 women's autonomy, women's autonomy. But I was very much struck with what I describe as the lack of

00:28:55.040 justice. I was able to recognize that in these two disparate, um, circumstances, there were human

00:29:02.760 beings on the monitor and one was being welcomed as a human being as a life with value. And the other

00:29:10.300 one was not. And I fundamentally found that that was a lack of justice. And that happened to coincide

00:29:16.460 in my own life, the Lord, how he just lines up the holes in the Swiss G's and makes, make it fall 0.86

00:29:21.700 right through into the truth. I was struggling with my own dignity and self-worth at the time.

00:29:26.360 And I had put my own dignity and self-worth extraneously in relationships. And I was struggling

00:29:32.920 with who I was. And if I had value, because if other people didn't see me as valuable,

00:29:37.360 am I not valuable? And I started asking myself if this woman who was devastated to be pregnant

00:29:43.360 asked me to perform her abortion, would I do it? And I thought, no, you know, I couldn't do it. 0.62

00:29:51.240 And I didn't know why I really did question myself. Was I afraid of social pressure that I didn't want

00:29:58.420 people to picket my workplace? I didn't want to embarrass my family members. If, if I even knew

00:30:04.440 there were pro-life, I didn't know. Um, I just didn't want to be embarrassed. I didn't want to

00:30:07.540 be harassed or anything like that. So I asked myself, but what if nobody knew, what if I could do

00:30:14.120 it in complete secrecy? Would you still do it? Would I do it? And I just felt very unsettled. And the answer

00:30:19.900 was no. And I struggled. I struggled with why, you know, I didn't have Christian anthropology

00:30:25.320 directly in my home. I wasn't taught about conscience and moral guide work. I just thought

00:30:31.580 of everything as being socially imposed on us by our community. And I didn't understand that was my

00:30:38.040 conscience, God just writing the truth in my heart. And I didn't know it at the time, but I thought,

00:30:42.180 what is this voice telling me? No. And it wasn't like, you know, you shall not do it, but like,

00:30:46.520 you shouldn't do that. And I didn't know. So I started digging for why, um, what that voice was,

00:30:53.560 where it's coming from. And it was, uh, God. And I encountered God. I became Christian and,

00:31:01.940 you know, to kind of narrow down the story, I was struggling. I didn't know what the difference

00:31:05.720 was between a Methodist and a Baptist and Episcopalians and Catholics. I didn't know any of

00:31:09.780 that. And I would ask people and I think I embarrassed them. They didn't want to know. I was just on fire.

00:31:14.800 Somebody tell me what the difference is. And people are like, can you pump the brakes? You're

00:31:18.380 kind of intense. I'm like, I know, but I want to know. And one day I was in an operating room

00:31:22.700 with, um, uh, a urogynecologist, excellent surgeon. And I was talking to people in the room

00:31:28.860 about like this Christian conversion and where was I supposed to go? And a couple of weeks later,

00:31:33.620 she came up to me. I think this is such a funny story. She, she literally handed me the catechism of

00:31:38.920 the Catholic church and with the worst cell. She's like, I am a lapsed Catholic. So I have no

00:31:43.660 need for this book, but I'm going to give this to you. And this is what Catholics believe. 0.93

00:31:49.440 And right there in front of her, I opened it up to the back and you know, it's weird. It's like page

00:31:55.420 numbers, paragraph numbers. And it was, I looked up the word conscience because I had now been taught

00:31:59.480 like, that's what it was. It was my conscience that had informed me that I couldn't do abortions.

00:32:03.700 And I went to the back and I looked up the word conscience and it is article 1776. And I flipped

00:32:09.120 through it. I found it and I read it right there in front of her. And I just knew in that moment,

00:32:13.120 I'm like, I'm going to be Catholic because it was true. I, what I read, I knew it was true 0.95

00:32:17.800 that what had been brought about awoken in me was God's law that had been inscribed in my heart

00:32:26.000 that for some reason, you know, in his own timing, he revealed to me. And I knew then that

00:32:33.560 I wanted that truth. And then once I knew about the Eucharist, I was like, I was all in, 0.92

00:32:38.300 but that's how I became Christian and then Catholic. And I wish I could say that immediately

00:32:42.240 I was a St. Therese and did all the things, but it took me a while to have the courage,

00:32:47.320 the moral courage to align my life and my practice and to trust God, right? You just think that if I

00:32:52.920 follow after you, even if you've seen his goodness displayed a million times, you're like,

00:32:57.020 I don't know. I still don't trust you. It's that doubting Thomas deep down in there,

00:33:00.380 like, show me the way. Can I, I'll go with you. If you show me the light at the end of the

00:33:03.380 tunnel and put it on display, but sometimes he just, he needs more from you. He needs you to go

00:33:08.100 in trust and blindness and praise God that I did because here I am like talking to you,

00:33:14.660 you know, amazing. It's amazing. You had it in your heart that it was a question of justice.

00:33:20.220 And then you read in 1776 in the Catechism that it's God's law and it completely coincides with what

00:33:28.660 you were thinking already in your heart. Would you mind telling us a little bit about that move?

00:33:33.380 I know it's very hard because you, the move from not trusting to trusting. And was there anything

00:33:39.600 there that helped you make, it's another leap, even though you're already Catholic, it's like

00:33:44.560 another leap to trust him fully and to give yourself in every way to him.

00:33:49.320 I had that conversion experience, became Catholic. And it's interesting. He doesn't ask you to,

00:33:55.780 he knows how we are, like that you have to just break off the parts, print it, print it as you go.

00:33:59.800 And so I, you know, very quickly around the time I happened to meet my husband, married my husband,

00:34:05.580 and he's a Catholic, cradle Catholic and had a reversion in large part because I was just

00:34:10.760 peppering him with questions. I didn't know he was Catholic. And when I met him, anyway, I met him,

00:34:16.220 he saw that I was looking up RCIA programs. I'm like, are you Catholic? And so I started peppering

00:34:20.400 him. And so we started dating and I talked to him and we got married. And so very quickly,

00:34:24.360 I was able to recognize how I wanted this in my own life. But, um, I was finishing my military

00:34:29.500 residency. I was going to get a new military like assignment. And so I just made a deal with myself

00:34:34.360 like, okay, Lord, I know that you want me to stop prescribing. And the reason I knew that he wanted

00:34:39.460 me to stop prescribing was because, um, a doctor that I was working with at the time when I came into

00:34:45.420 the church, hand me humana vitae. And he said, this is the reason I stopped doing IVF. And I was like,

00:34:52.860 whoa. I mean, that was his career and he stopped doing it. And I was just, I was so busy. I couldn't

00:34:57.620 take the time to read it at the time. I knew I would, I saved it, but I just, I was for whatever

00:35:02.560 reason, I didn't read it. And so I just kept going. But I, what I had convinced myself was

00:35:06.220 when I leave this military base and I go to a new one, I'll start fresh then. Like why go back? I've

00:35:11.980 only got a year left. Why are less? I'm like, why am I going to just make this transition when I am just

00:35:17.100 going to do it seamlessly in a year? Well, I ended up staying on at the place I was still working.

00:35:21.920 And so for another three-year assignment, and I was grateful to do that. My husband was living

00:35:27.760 in Cincinnati, so was happy to stay on in Dayton, but I then struggled with like, okay, now what am

00:35:32.300 I going to do? And so I just kept going. I just kept going the way that I was. And I was formed.

00:35:36.960 I was an all in Catholic, all in. So I stopped going to confession because I knew I wasn't making

00:35:41.680 a good confession. The Lord had asked me to stop. And I'm like, not now. I don't want to. And I'm not

00:35:47.440 going to come to confession because I'm, I'm honestly, I'm not doing it thoroughly. And I'm

00:35:51.240 not asking you to come heal this part of my life. And I felt wildly duplicitous. I just cannot describe

00:35:56.700 how terribly torn I was to no longer go to confession, hungering for it, but lacked the

00:36:03.480 moral courage, you know, to do it. And I, I've never shared this story. Really, I've never shared

00:36:09.080 the story. Um, but one day I was doing intrauterine insemination. Like that's how in I was. I was doing

00:36:15.620 an intrauterine insemination for a couple when I was on active duty. And, um, after we were done,

00:36:23.420 she laid there for 10 minutes after I put the sperm in and did all this stuff. And she looked over at 0.68

00:36:27.920 me and just very funny. She was trying to be funny. She looked over at me. She goes, I guess I'm going to

00:36:31.800 start calling you my baby daddy now. And it just seemed very odd to me. I just felt like she meant that to

00:36:37.340 be funny. We're just wasting time. But I just took that so personally. I don't know. I didn't feel

00:36:43.220 like she was insulting me, but it just really hurt me that I, she described me as taking the place of

00:36:49.060 her husband and it really, it, it stung. It really stung. And it made me realize right then, very hard.

00:36:55.420 I was about to leave the military. I'm like, I'm not doing this anymore. And I don't mean not doing

00:36:59.420 what I was doing. I mean, I'm not doing medicine anymore. I can't do it. If I'm not able to walk away

00:37:06.560 from something that is making me feel so divided, you know, a house divided against itself can't

00:37:12.420 stand. And I just was desperate. I'm like, I'm not doing it anymore. So I was willing to

00:37:18.020 leave medicine behind. Around that time, I was pregnant with my third baby. My husband was working,

00:37:25.680 I was finishing his residency and was going on to be a physician. And we decided where we were going to go.

00:37:29.760 And I thought, okay, well, I'm just going to stop. I'm going to be home with my baby for,

00:37:33.900 you know, a year and I'll see, but I'm going to leave it behind. And in that year, God's providence,

00:37:40.100 I had people reach out to me from our local diocese asking me, had I ever heard of natural

00:37:44.740 family planning, whatever, consider training, and they were going to give me a grant to go.

00:37:49.040 And I thought, and around the time I started meeting Catholics, we were finally in a real parish. I had

00:37:53.820 real friendships with other Catholics. And they would ask me like, can you read my NFP chart? I'm like,

00:37:57.660 I don't know what you're talking about. And so I started opening up those doors and learning because

00:38:03.340 women asked me. Fundamentally, I love women. I do. That's my job. I want to care for them. 1.00

00:38:10.000 And when I saw this need, can you help me? Can you help my husband? Can you help us? I wanted to.

00:38:16.500 That's the altruism, you know, of medicine. And it was them asking me that I was able to give my yes.

00:38:22.740 And when I gave my yes to those patients and I gave my yes back to God, he opened up all these doors.

00:38:28.880 And I had never seen the need of, you can practice in a way that you didn't know and you

00:38:34.820 hadn't been exposed to. And you may not have a million people beating down your door, but those

00:38:39.540 who do are asking for you to care for them in this vacuum, this horrible void of how can you

00:38:45.840 care for me as a woman in a way that upholds the dignity of the human person, that views my marriage

00:38:52.260 and our fertility as a couple as good and holy and something to be, you know, treated reverentially.

00:38:59.360 And it wasn't until I just said, Lord, I'll leave it all behind for you that he was like,

00:39:04.800 so I needed you to say, and there it was, right? There it was. And here I am.

00:39:11.140 Dr. Alicia Thompson, thank you so much for sharing this. God bless.

The John-Henry Westen Show - April 09, 2025

Hidden SECRET Behind IVF： Doctor SPEAKS OUT!

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