Former abortionist recalls moment of pro-life conversion: ‘God’s mercy is here’

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Oct 23, 2022 / 11:00 am

As an OB-GYN in training, Dr. John Bruchalski considered abortion to be health care. But that changed when, one night, he was caught between trying to save the life of one unborn baby — and ending the life of another.

Bruchalski, author of “Two Patients: My Conversion from Abortion to Life-Affirming Medicine,” now dedicates his life to providing life-affirming health care in Northern Virginia as the founder of a pro-life faith-based obstetrics and gynecology practice, Tepeyac OB-GYN, and a nonprofit dedicated to pro-life medicine, Divine Mercy Care. 

He spoke with EWTN Pro-Life Weekly in an episode that aired on Oct. 20 to discuss his new book — and his pro-life conversion story.

Bruchalski said the critical point of his conversion came when he served as a second-year resident in a OB-GYN training program where he “learned to do abortions at all times for whatever reasons.” 

One evening, he found himself “split between life and death.” 

“In labor and delivery that night, in one room, the mom wanted the baby so I took a good history and did everything I could to keep the baby inside alive,” he remembered. “But in the next room, because the mom didn’t want it, I didn’t take a good history because it wasn’t wanted.”

That baby, he said, survived the attempted abortion.

“I broke the water, gave her medicine to deliver her baby,” he recalled. “I delivered the baby; it looked a little big. I either could have suffocated it because it was born alive or I [could throw] it on the scale.”

He did the latter. The baby weighed more than 500 grams — or more than one pound — and he called in the neonatal intensive care doctors. 

“I didn’t take a good history, the baby was farther along, and in walked the neonatal doctor and said, ‘Why are you treating my patients as tumors? Come to me tomorrow, have some coffee, because you’re better than this,’” Bruchalski remembered. 

That moment, he said, jumpstarted his conversion.

“It was the facts of OB/GYN wanting to have abortion as part of good health care, but then someone stopped me in my tracks and confronted me,” he said. “That’s that moment that I had to respond to.”

Today, he says, he bears the “scar of abortion.”

“It’s not a wound anymore because of Jesus’ mercy,” he stressed. “Jesus’ mercy is the most wonderful medicine.”

He stressed that there is hope for those who have been involved in abortion.

“If you’re miserable out there and you’ve had scars with your own abortions or referring for abortions, are you in the doctor community, in the health care community, God’s mercy is here and he just loves you more than you know,” Bruchalski said.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision in June to overturn Roe v. Wade that leaves abortion policy up to the states, Bruchalski noted the pain, anger, and ugliness that he witnessed from abortion activists. He identified it as post-traumatic stress syndrome.

“It takes one to know one. That’s me,” he said. “My heart got hardened.”

While he grew up in a Catholic family that prayed the rosary every morning, he called himself a “man-pleaser” rather than a “God-fearer.”

“And yet, as you do more and more abortions and you have to count body parts, and then you start killing sick children in the wombs of their mother,” he said, “the pain, the hardness of heart, the sharpness, it’s the opposite of being an excellent doctor.” 

Today, he dedicates his life to providing life-affirming health care as the founder of Tepeyac OB-GYN and Divine Mercy Care. He named Tepeyac, he said, after the hill that Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared to St. Juan Diego in Mexico in the 16th century.

“I put it in there because the pressures in medicine and the pressures in life are to go woke and broke spiritually,” he explained. “We don’t believe that murdering and killing life, or always pitting mom against the baby.”

He stressed that doctors do not need to end an unborn baby’s life to save the mother’s. 

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“Wrong answer,” he said. “We’ve been treating miscarriages and ectopics and all the conditions of OB-GYN for about 28 to 29 years without having to resort to elective abortion. Never.” 

He concluded by asking for prayers for his work, for health care providers, and for all physicians. 

“That power of loving the patient but hating the disease and knowing that medicine is an act of mercy, that's what's going to stand up to the hatred and to the bitterness and to the pain of trying to be the best patient you can be, the best mom you can be,” he said.