How a San Diego doctor led the antiabortion movement to embrace controversial pill ‘reversal’
LA TimesTwo months before the U.S. Supreme Court shot down an attempt to ban abortion medication, a San Diego County doctor who was a plaintiff in the case stepped onto a stage in Texas and warned that another civil war is coming — this time over an issue “deeper than” slavery. He has gone further than antiabortion Republicans who have pushed “fetal personhood” arguments — suggesting on a Catholic radio show last year that frozen embryos stored in labs be baptized, a move he acknowledged would melt and destroy them but at least they’d have a “course to salvation.” Since he published a controversial study about his abortion reversal method in 2018, Republicans in more than a dozen states including Arkansas and Kentucky have moved to pass laws requiring that abortion providers inform patients about it. In his many public retellings of that moment, Delgado said that “the Holy Spirit” then quickly guided him to discover what he would later coin as abortion pill reversal. McLemore said that Delgado’s movement is full of “ethical lapses,” which include exaggerating the possibility of abortion regret — a rate that research has found is very low. Still, Delgado has called abortion pill access as it stands, available by mail order with a prescription from a medical provider, “the Wild, Wild West” and warned that a patient “could die in the bathroom of her own home.” In 2018, Delgado’s career catapulted to new heights when he handed over his grassroots network promoting abortion pill reversal to Heartbeat International — a Christian-based organization that oversees thousands of crisis pregnancy centers dedicated to preventing abortion.