The Imaginarium of Doctor Delgado: The Make-Believe Medicine Behind SB 1318

pillDr. George Delgado, a gynecologist based in San Diego, is probably not likely to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine any time soon — or ever. Delgado’s dubious medical claims have been one of the driving forces behind a piece of legislation, Arizona Senate Bill 1318, that pushes what physician and state Rep. Randall Friese calls “fringe medicine.”

Delgado runs a website called Abortion Pill Reversal, offering 24-hour medical advice to women who have taken the abortion drug mifepristone and regret their decision. “There is an effective process for reversing the abortion pill, called ABORTION PILL REVERSAL, so call today!” the website cheers. Most people have probably never heard that a medication abortion — that is, an abortion performed by administering two pills — can be reversed. If this medical breakthrough sounds new, it’s because it doesn’t exist — at least not within any kind of evidence-based, established medical practice.


So-called abortion reversal is untested for safety or effectiveness.


Unsafe abortions have always been the consequence of the anti-abortion movement. Now unsafe abortion reversals can likely be added to that, thanks to the procedure Delgado has performed and promoted — in spite of scant evidence of its safety and effectiveness. In the two-step process of a medication abortion, a provider first administers a dose of mifepristone and then follows it with a dose of misoprostol. Delgado claims he can intervene in a medication abortion so that the patient’s pregnancy can continue. If patients change their minds after the first step, Delgado claims, they can counteract the initial drug with a dose of progesterone.

For published medical literature, Delgado can claim a 2012 article he co-wrote in the Annals of Pharmacotherapy. The article describes six abortion reversal patients, four of whom, he claims, remained pregnant. Though published in a legitimate medical journal, Delgado’s findings were from a small sample of patients, none of whom were compared in a controlled study to patients who did not undergo the progesterone treatment. Moreover, not everything that’s published in medical journals is well received by the medical community. Dr. David A. Grimes, a physician formerly with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, calls the article “an incompletely documented collection of anecdotes.” Continue reading

Mythbusting: Does Abortion Cause Breast Cancer?

breast-examNew England Journal of Medicine. Journal of the American Medical Association. Annals of Internal MedicineJournal of American Physicians and Surgeons.

[O]ne of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn’t belong. But how can most laypeople differentiate between these medical journals? The dry, pithy titles seem to tell you exactly what’s underneath their covers. So if I told you that, according to a study in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, abortion increases risk for breast cancer, would you believe me? Well, why not? The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), which publishes the journal, sounds legit.


Health decisions must be guided by reliable evidence, and when agenda-driven policies misinform, patients cannot make informed decisions.


Except that AAPS is infamous for its agenda-driven views, and its journal is used to deny climate change and the dangers of secondhand smoking, promote the debunked idea that vaccines cause autism, advocate for closed borders in overtly racist anti-immigration pieces, reject the causal relationship between HIV and AIDS, and perpetuate a far-right political worldview. The organization opposes any government involvement in health care, including the FDA, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, and regulation of the medical profession.

Medical journals, like all scientific journals, are where researchers share and critique each other’s work. Before anything is published it undergoes “peer review,” in which experts evaluate studies for quality — good study design, reasonable interpretation of results, etc. The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, however, has been criticized for placing ideology over the presentation of meticulously gathered scientific evidence, and is not indexed in academic databases like MEDLINE. In 2007, AAPS joined conservative organizations in filing a lawsuit against the FDA, arguing against emergency contraception’s over-the-counter status. So, when the journal publishes articles purporting a link between abortion and breast cancer, we should all be raising our eyebrows in collective skepticism.

You might have heard abortion opponents’ claims that abortion can raise one’s risk for breast cancer later in life. So let’s get something out of the way right now: The very best scientific evidence does not support a link between abortion and breast cancer. Prominent medical organizations, including the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the World Health Organization, have all examined the entirety of the research and found that the largest and most methodologically sound studies fail to reveal a link between abortion and breast cancer. Yet still opponents of abortion include this factoid in misinformation campaigns to instill fear into people making difficult, private decisions, often during periods of vulnerability. Continue reading