Hidden SECRET Behind IVF： Doctor SPEAKS OUT!
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Summary
In this episode, Dr. Alicia Thompson shares her conversion story from being pro-choice to pro-life, and why she believes IVF should not be used to fertilize human embryos. Dr. Thompson is a practicing OBGYN and a Catholic.
Transcript
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She described me as taking the place of her husband. It stung. It really stung. And it
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made me realize right then, I'm not doing this anymore.
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My friends, in vitro fertilization is all in the news. And we're here at the Bring America Back
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to Life conference. And yesterday, I heard a fascinating thing from a physician, from an OBGYN,
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like with all the bona fides to speak to this issue about IVF. Even more fascinating, I thought,
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was her conversion story from being on the other side of the pro-life argument to now being a
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pro-lifer. So it's just stunning. And it's so rare to find someone who is an OBGYN who's not only
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willing to say it, but actually willing to tell her story as well. Dr. Alicia Thompson, good to be with
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you. John Henry, nice to meet you. Let's begin as we always do with the sign of the cross.
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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. So your story was super
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fascinating when I heard it last night, as you just described so briefly, what you experienced.
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But let's start off with IVF, because right now, IVF is being almost by both sides, because
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I think most Catholics are confused by it. Often, you'll have a priest recommend it even
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for people who are experiencing infertility. But tell us medically, what's the issue with in vitro
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fertilization? So I think the most important thing to understand, it's not just IVF that I'm
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going to talk about today and what I want to highlight, but it's actually an entire body of
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medicine that's called assisted reproductive technology. So it's not just IVF, but it's other
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technologies as well that are employed in order to help individuals build families, be that married
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couples or women who want to be single mothers by choice or same-sex partnerships. These are the
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technologies used to help build families. I think it's very confusing, because so many people look
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at it as family building is beautiful. It's a good and noble goal to want to bring life into the world
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and have a family. But they don't necessarily understand how it's being done and how it's being
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employed. And so basically, IVF is creating human life and fertilizing eggs outside of the sexual act.
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So they are effectively creating life in a lab. And the issue that is so important to shine a light
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on is it's a very utilitarian practice. There's a lot of embryos that are created and typically less
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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
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disturbing process on how many embryos are lost. It's unbelievable. There are all sorts of examples you
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could give to this. But if most of them are dying, some of them are ending up in cryopreservation,
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freezing forever and ever, and then thaw and die. But so even though it seems like so pro-life because
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it's a baby, it's really pro-death when you're talking about nine children dead for every one that
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you could get. Agreed. And I think the hard part is the incredible crisis of frozen embryos that we have
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in the United States. And the way that we practice that in this country is different from other areas
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in the Western world. So my goal, because there's so much disagreement in the pro-life movement on,
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you know, is this a morally permissible thing to do or is it not? I think we can move past that
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and allow people at this point, since we don't even know what's going on, to educate what's going on
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and say, okay, well, we're all going to understand that it's happening. And right now we're moving in
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a direction where there may actually be set aside for federal funds. I mean, even the conservative
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movement is saying we're pro-IVF, we're for IVF. But to be able to say, okay, you can be for something,
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but you should understand how it's being done and how it's being carried out so that we can have some
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guardrails, some very common sense guardrails in order to make this something that, you know,
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quite honestly, is not so destructive to human life because it can be done better than it is now,
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even if you fundamentally disagree with IVF as a process, you can do it in a way that's better
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than it's being done now. There is medical intervention that can help that has nothing
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to do with assisted reproductive technology in the bad way. That's about NAPR technology, about
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there are sometimes the need for physical intervention that can help too. That's all legit by
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the church as well. Absolutely. One of the things that's important to know fundamentally is that
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research follows money. And since IVF came about in the 1970s, there's a lot of money in it, lots of
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research in it. And unfortunately, about 30% of couples who experience infertility have an unexplained
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diagnosis. That's extraordinarily unsettling to people. They don't understand why they are not
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fundamentally able to get pregnant the way that most people can. And they don't understand why.
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Even if you cannot resolve the problem, the understanding of, well, why is it happening to begin with
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is very unsettling? Because if you don't know why it's happening, how are you treating it? And are you
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treating it in a way that's restoring fertility or in a way that kind of bypasses fertility? And praise God
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that for many years now, we have had a really an explosion in what I would call restorative reproductive
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medicine, including NAPR technology, FEM, which is a fertility education and medical management, which has an
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entire research arm called RHRI, the Marquette method. There are now specialists, which didn't even exist 10 years ago,
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on reproductive immunology, understanding how the immune system is playing a role. And this is just
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all opening up the field so that you're not just left with, don't do this over here and then do
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nothing. I don't think we should be a culture that says, don't do IVF, but then not make anything else
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available to these couples who are suffering. They're very much suffering. And I thank God every day that
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this is really a horizon that is just coming broad open in front of us.
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It's beautiful that this is happening. You said something very interesting about the funding,
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the money, because as we just saw with the whole pharmaceutical industry and its horrors over the
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last little while, that's just being exposed now. That's a huge deal that I think most people were
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completely blind to. But you see that's happening in the IVF sphere specifically.
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Yes, but that's because of the incredible amount of money that's just going into it directly.
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So IVF is, in many states, not covered by insurance. So people are just paying out lots
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and lots of money. And because the goal of IVF is a take-home baby rate, right? They want these
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couples to be able to take home a baby. There is lots of experimentation done, regulation, meaning like,
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okay, can we improve freezing rates? How can we make this better? And so there's lots of head-to-head
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protocols that come up in this field that is funded by, you know, the companies that make the
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medications or that the couples themselves are willing to participate in. So they're just generating
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a lot of data. Conversely, OB-GYNs like myself, we're just community OB-GYNs. We're not working in
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academic centers. We are not using very expensive medications for most of our patients. It's hard to
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get in and do big research protocols. You know, quite frankly, I don't see thousands of patients
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coming through every year for infertility. I don't have that kind of money coming into my office. The
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patients generally aren't paying for that. It's an insurance-covered thing. So it's just harder to
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compete with generating data. It does happen. You know, Phil Boyle, who does these over in Ireland,
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he does neofertility. He publishes a lot. Again, RHRI publishes a lot. So we do have people that are
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doing it, but it's just a much smaller cohort of people generating the data against this huge industry.
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One way especially that I think it's fascinating is that the methods that are proposed that are
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licit according to the church, but also according to just a plain old plan of God. I mean, he intended
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every child to come into this world by the loving sexual union of a husband and wife. And so
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that kind of procreation still honors that. A lot of them are natural, this big move toward
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being more natural and non-invasive and don't take drugs. There's a lot of natural ways that
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they're doing it. Agreed. I used to have a lot of patients who were coming to me through
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religious reason, but I have patients that come to me because like, as you said, they don't
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necessarily want to eat it. I joke, but I'm like, they don't want to eat an egg that came from a
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chicken that was given hormones and, or they failed IVF. And so they're, you know, not just with
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IVF generally, but also women's health. Generally, we have seen a really remarkable explosion in what
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I would call fertility awareness-based methods of family planning, where women are starting to
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recognize that fertility is beautiful. It's part of our, how our bodies work to hold normal
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ovulation and our cycles as a gold standard for reproductive health. Reproductive health in women
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is very complicated. The, how hard it is to generate an egg, um, the, the hormonal processes
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involved there, the incredible number of ways that you can have disruption in that, that we are able
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to now, what somebody has described as like unleashing the cycle. You should be using the menstrual cycle
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as a vital sign. And then when you use it as a vital sign, you can recognize there are problems.
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And then you can use those, uh, things that women are noticing and bringing to you. Like this is
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happening. I'm bleeding abnormally. I have long cycles. I'm having a lot of pain. I'm not noticing
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a good, um, like a mucus pattern, which we use as a sign of fertility. And we can really hone in
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on what's going on, what could be causing this disruption and give us an area of where we can
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dig deeper to figure out why these things are happening. Even apart from getting pregnant,
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I very much want to distill down that women's reproductive health does not distill down to,
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do you want to make a baby or do you not? Because ovulation is good. It's good. That's what
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we're designed to do. And it's, um, I think always a little bizarre to me that we're just so ready to
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turn off female gonads. You know, that's what we are doing when we're disrupting ovulation. We're
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just turning them off. And I just, um, I'm grateful to see that so many people are interested in not
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doing that to allow the body to function as God designed it. That part of it's so fascinating
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because as you were saying, it's not just about pregnancy or avoiding pregnancy. It's about general
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health and it's health in ways I think that are still, we're still tapping into because, uh, I know
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with my own, my two daughters and, and one of them went for this testing to, and it amazingly helped
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her health. And it's not about getting pregnant. She's, she's not married yet, which is nothing,
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but it's about getting her cycles under control and, and massive headaches. And it's amazing what it's
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done because it's like this whole field of health that it's sort of off the charts from regular
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medicine. So you feel like, what am I going to here? But our faith connection helped it, but it's
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a real science, but it's so ignored. It's so pushed down that people don't hear about it. And I'm hoping
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and I'm thinking that once this gets explored more as it is, praise God, um, we might find all sorts
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of health benefits from this. I agree with you. Um, there's been an explosion in apps, you know,
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so many things are, we like to focus a lot of sometimes on the negatives of the digital world,
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but there is so many positives. There are apps, there are temperature devices that you can use.
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There are hormone testing kits that you can do at home to check your, um, urinary hormones, um,
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that can really make readily available to women and even girls, what is going on in the body?
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Can I determine what's happening? Why am I experiencing this? So much of what women can
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suffer and experience can be dependent on your hormonal phase. You know, men, your fertility
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is pretty much the same minute to minute, to minute, to minute for women, you get a very
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remarkable hormonal changes depending on the portion of the cycle you're in. So when women
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come in and say things to me like, Oh, well I'm having headaches or I'm having GI disturbances,
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you know, gastrointestinal disturbances, or they're having mood changes. If they give me a chart
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and they show me where it's happening, I can at least to some degree hone in on,
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is this hormonally dependent? If so, what's going on and can I help improve it? And it really opens
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up such a broad variety of suffering to be improved upon because these hormones are not just affecting
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your ovaries. You know, this is actually the hypothalamus, the pituitary, the ovaries,
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the adrenal glands, and there are these hormones affect your whole body. They really do. Um, you know,
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people like to oversee that, but it really does. It can change so much and you can improve so much
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if you just know what's going on. Let's get into those improvements in more layman's terms because
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I think that's going to be super fascinating for people. So my daughter, one of the things I noticed
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was that mood changes were like actually apparent after simple treatments, natural treatments. It was
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eating treatment. Like it was so simple and yet it was so foreign before they call it allopathic
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medicine was just take drugs. You're going to, you know, you have these massive headaches, take,
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take, take drugs. She took so many at one point that she had an ulcer from taking this. And yet
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there's this unbelievable way of doing it, but it's, it's so foreign that it's almost like you feel like
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it's a voodoo doctor. What are we doing? But yet it's there and it's being suppressed. And that's,
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I'm so happy to hear that it's coming to the fore finally.
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Yes. It's been excellent. I, um, some of the things that I see particularly with mood and I
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see this a lot, for example, with perimenopausal women, women who are coming into the end of their
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reproductive years, we can have sharp changes in hormonal fluctuations. And I give this example
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around the third day of a woman's cycle, her period beginning, her estrogen level, maybe a 30 to a 50.
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And the time that she goes to ovulate, it'll go to 250 to 400. That generally is a period where women
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feel pretty good. They have good energy. They're more playful, more likely to flirt, um, those types
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of things. But in perimenopause, that value can go not to 400, but to 800. And these are, this is
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typically the time of a woman's cycle where she feels really good. And it's interesting in particular
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NFP users are natural women who allow themselves to ovulate can find these very disturbing trends
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that, and a part of their cycle that had always been very friendly to them. And so you can go in
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and figure out why that's happening and explain to them why this may be happening, why it may be
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normal, but also physiologic and see if you can improve it. Conversely, we can have women who are
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young and the week leading before their period, it may not just be, you know, a little breast
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tenderness or a little, you know, I'm a little bit more irritable, but really truly be overwhelmed
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with their emotional changes, headaches. They can have GI changes. Um, they're getting very, um,
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constipated loose stool, um, terrible pain where they can double over kind of curl up into a ball.
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You can dig at that and try to understand like, why is this happening? There can be all sorts of
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reasons. It can be progesterone abnormalities. They can be having a reflex to something called
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prostaglandins that are released when the period begins. There's all sorts of things that you can
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look at and improve upon without just saying, you know, the way to improve these cycle changes
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you're having is to just shut it off. You know, that's really what has been the mainstay of
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gynecologic health for 60 years. And interestingly, when I became an OBGYN, I was a pro-choice, didn't
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know anybody that did natural family planning. That was like totally foreign to me. I received zero
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lectures in my OBGYN residency on natural family planning. And it wasn't until I became a convert
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that people would ask me, they just assumed as an OBGYN, I would know what natural family planning was,
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that I would know a different way of practicing. To be direct, I lacked the courage initially for
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many years, three years. I like to think of St. Paul going into Arabia for three years. Like,
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I don't know what he was doing down there, but I'd like to think he was wrestling with God. And like,
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what are you asking me to do? Because when I had the call to work in a different way,
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to stop prescribing, stop tying tubes, I just didn't know if that was possible. I didn't know that
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you could be an OBGYN and have a career and not practice the way that you were trained. And I
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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
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all sorts of other things. It can be a literal game changer for women. And it's really inexpensive.
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.
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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.
00:17:21.380
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Speaking personally, it was a miracle. My wife had three miscarriages after our seventh child.
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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
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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
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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
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devastating for my wife. It was the worst bedside manner I've ever heard of. But after she prayed,
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Lord, don't let him be your prophet. Like, anyway, we went to see a NAPRO doctor. They prescribed her
00:19:04.420
progesterone because they tested her and she was just super low in progesterone. I had heard this
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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,
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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
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miraculous. Progesterone is just an amazing hormone in typical cycles, meaning where women
00:19:42.980
are actually ovulating. It is made after the egg has been released. And it comes from the Greek
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
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.
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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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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,
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
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.
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.