Abortion Pill Reversal

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Dec 11, 2025 | In Reviews

In 2008, Dr. George Delgado, a family physician in San Diego County, California, received a phone call from a pro-life sidewalk counselor, Terry Palmquist, explaining that a woman in Texas had asked her for help after starting a chemical abortion using mifepristone. The woman had changed her mind and wanted desperately to know whether the abortion could be stopped.

In response to Terry’s request for a solution, Dr. Delgado wracked his brain. Then he asked Dr. Thomas Hilgers at the Saint Paul VI Institute in San Francisco to comment on the possibility of combatting the mifepristone with progesterone. Heartened by the response, Delgado arranged with a Texas physician, Jonnalyn Belocura, who was trained in Natural Procreative (NaPro) Technology, and who was willing to take the pregnant woman on as a patient to attempt to block the abortifacient chemicals and thwart the abortion.

From a distance, Dr. Delgado monitored the effort to save the baby by reversing the ability of the mother’s body to absorb the poison, and the mother delivered a healthy girl at full term. Eighteen months later, the ecstatic mom sent him a photo of her precious toddler with the inscription, “Thank you, Dr. Delgado.”

Over the next two years, Dr. Delgado received an increasing number of phone calls from clinics and doctors attempting to help other women who wished to stop the process of chemical abortion before it was too late. In 2011, he worked with Dr. Mary Davenport in the San Francisco Bay Area to help another woman to stop her chemical abortion. This attempt was unsuccessful, but the two doctors decided to collaborate in writing up a protocol for abortion pill reversal to be added to the available medical literature.

With more and more requests for help coming in, Dr. Delgado also launched a network called Abortion Pill Reversal in 2012, with the support of the non-profit pro-life organization Culture of Life Family Services in Escondido, California (also in San Diego County).

A bigger picture

Dr. Delgado initially thought he was the first to figure out how to reverse the process of chemical abortion to save a baby’s life, but he later learned that Dr. Matthew Harrison had effected a reversal of mifepristone abortion in North Carolina in 2006. In any case, through Dr. Delgado’s determination to make this possibility better known, many more courageous women have fought to reverse their attempts to chemically abort their babies.

The bottom line at the present time is this: While the efforts to challenge the fast-tracked approval of chemical abortion in the United States and elsewhere have not been successful (and will likely never be successful in the current moral climate), the options for women to reverse the process of chemical abortion if they change their minds have expanded rapidly around the world. Interest and availability is growing in Australia, Mexico, Russia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Lithuania, Colombia and elsewhere, as described in Dr. Delgado’s book Abortion Pill Reversal: A Second Chance at Choice, published this year by Ignatius Press.

At the same time, sadly, we live in a post-Christian culture of despair. Millions of people have been tempted into a false vision of reality which makes them think that the absolute personal freedom to do whatever they want whenever they want it is the key to happiness. In country after country, the governmental medical establishments have made easy access to abortion a top priority, often bending the medical approval rules to satisfy the demand from those who desire and those who profit from abortion. At the same time, a great many obstacles are placed in front of women who wish to reverse their own decisions to abort, and those who wish to help them.

A chilling case in point is provided by Dr. Dermot Kearney in the United Kingdom who was enlisted by an American nurse to help a young UK mother who wanted to reverse the effects of the abortion pill (mifepristone) that she had just taken. This eventually led to the attempt to set up an Abortion Pill Reversal service in the United Kingdom. The result was a campaign against Dr. Kearney, based mainly on the assumption that anyone who helped a woman to reverse an attempted abortion must have brainwashed that person, prevented her from seeking independent counseling, and given her unethical financial inducements to save her child.

This resulted in restrictions on Dr. Kearney’s ability to practice medicine; for some months he was actually prohibited from saving lives. Though he was vindicated in the end, his efforts to help women reverse their attempts at chemical abortion were set back for the better part of a year.

The desired outcome

Obviously, not all attempts at abortion pill reversal are successful. Sometimes a pregnant woman cannot find the expert medical assistance she needs. At other times, the intervention comes too late. One must also allow for those women who change their minds again and fail to complete the process of reversing the effects of the pill. But for those who start treatment soon enough and persevere with the treatment, the success rate is over fifty percent, and perhaps over sixty percent, depending on all the circumstances.

Of course this is not magic. A successful outcome depends on how quickly and thoroughly each woman’s and each baby’s body reacts to both the poison and the antidote, as well as on the timeliness of the intervention and the ongoing commitment to reversal on the part of the mother. But what is clear is that if a mother changes her mind soon after taking the abortion pill, the chemical reversal process gives her a good chance of bearing a healthy son or daughter.

Or maybe more than one. This is how Terri Corado described her experience at a Planned Parenthood Clinic, where she learned that she was carrying twins:

I swallowed the [first] pill and walked out. I got into my car and cried; I couldn’t talk; I could barely stand. I was disappointed in myself, disgusted, and numb, and I had thoughts of harming myself so I wouldn’t have to live with the decision I had just made. I called my boyfriend and told him that I didn’t want to live anymore, that I had made the most awful decision. I was so ashamed of myself. I don’t remember much of that conversation other than his just supporting me, trying to calm me down, and offering to help me find a solution. He said there had to be a reversal—something that could stop the abortion. I just kept repeating, “What have I done?”

But Terri and her boyfriend searched online and discovered Abortion Pill Reversal. She was able to make an appointment and was helped by a Dr. Dewey. Years later, this is how she describes the result: “My babies now are six years old, and they are thriving…. Dr. Dewey not only saved my babies; she also saved me.”

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For much more on this subject, see George Delgado, MD. Abortion Pill Reversal: A Second Chance at Choice. Ignatius Press, 2025. Paper $18.95; eBook $12.32.