Dr. John Bruchalski’s new book ‘To Patients’: My Conversion from Abortion to Life-Affirming Medicine’ tells his pro-life story as an OB/GYN.
John Bruchalski is a 62 year old husband, father and OB/GYN physician. In October 2022, Ignatius Press published his memoir, which describes what Bruchalski called his “sacred path to conversion”. The name of this book is Two Patients: My Conversion from Abortion to Life-Affirming Medicine.
Bruchalski grew up in a northern New Jersey Polish family, the oldest of three boys. Described as “loyal and fun”, his mother was a prayerful stay-at-home mother and his father was a Latin and religion teacher at a Salesian prep school.
Bruchalski says, “Being an altar boy, playing baseball, Polish family kielbasa-iron-butchers, and fishing with mom and family was great growing up.”
His father regularly took students to the March for Life.
“I distinctly remember, as I was practicing foul shots in my driveway on a cold January morning in 1973, my father identified the day as ‘Black Monday,’ when we, as a nation As in, had legalized the killing of unborn children of mothers in their wombs. ,” Bruchalsky. “I had no idea, with my knack for science and mentors who encouraged me to look at medicine as a profession, that I would one day tell my parents that I was having an abortion.”
Through his parents’ prayers and God’s mercy and grace, Bruchalski says that the hardness of his heart was eventually repaired. Aletia talks with him about how he went from having an abortion to starting a pro-life women’s health center and writing his new memoir.
Why do you think abortion was a good medical solution for women?
There were actually three interrelated reasons why I adopted the mindset that abortion is good medicine for women. This began with my education and my peers growing up in the late 1970s and continued through my medical training and halfway through my residency until the winter of 1989.
I grew up during the so-called “sexual revolution”. In my formative years outside the home, both male and female friends were talking openly about their sexual freedom, freedom from parents and traditions, and freedom from the “myths” they had come to believe as gospel. Had gone. So, my friends were the “living books” I read, studied, and listened to during those early years of my life. If these were the values of my comrades, if this liberation was so important to happiness, then as a doctor I should provide such medical services to women.
My journey of faith outside my family and parish in the 1970s and 1980s was filled with many pillars of the new formation of our Catholic faith. My conscience, I came to believe, was my supreme guide and the church could not force me to change my mind. My church was one of many paths to God. The saints were everyday people, struggling to deal with the impossible and insurmountable structures and circumstances that entangle our hearts. We focused on the social principles of the Bible rather than the myths of saints and miracles. As a generation, we were impoverished by the grace of the truth and tradition of the Catholic Church.
My journey into scientific study taught me that what my faith taught me was backward, dangerous, and anathema to women and science and medicine. Abortion, contraception, feticide, sterilization and the morning-after pill were all essential reproductive health rights that “people” have a right to for their own health and happiness. Everything outside this “evidence-based approach” was heresy.
What changed?
Change came for me in early 1989. I was an OB/GYN resident living the status quo, practicing so-called “good medicine”. Cognitive dissonance was building up inside me. At night I was visiting a pregnancy resource center, watching an evangelical community of faith work to save women from abortion. During the day I was torturing as a respectful and caring OB/GYN. The medical data in our journals were clearly indicating the dangerous side effects of abortion and its association with mental illness, premature birth and breast cancer. But with each miscarriage I felt my heart grow harder and harder, lower and lower, deeper and deeper.
Then Dr. Debbie Plumb, a conscientious Catholic NICU doctor, challenged me to stop treating my patients, these babies, because the tumors needed to be cut out. Over coffee, shortly thereafter, he challenged me to go and visit Medjugorje. My mother, it seemed coincidental at the time, asked me to move there for the winter break. There in Yugoslavia, in prayer, the scales fell from my eyes. I became a redeemed sinner and I was touched by the holy source of divine mercy with the help of His Blessed Mother.
What is the significance of the title of your new book, ‘Two Patients’, and how does it influence your work?
Once His love and truth and kindness assure you how deeply “beloved” you are, you understand how unworthy you are of all His gifts, and you are so grateful.
I came back from Medjugorje knowing that I could never go back to the medicine I was practicing. Our mother instructed me to be the best doctor I could be, visit the poor daily and follow the teachings of her son’s church.
By 1994 I had established Tepeyac OB/GYN. My heart was bursting with fire to share with other physicians and patients what compassionate, life-affirming medicine could be. Hope in God’s mercy is the grace of faith, which is love in action. When you wish to integrate the best of modern medicine with the healing presence of Jesus Christ, Two Patient Medicine is the way to go.
What makes the Tepayak Center that you set up unique?
There are two unique aspects to Tepeyac OB/GYN (founded as Tepeyac Family Center) and Divine Mercy Care, the non-profit organization I founded to support Tepeyac’s work.
First, the foundation of our care is one of almsgiving. Medicine is an act of kindness. It is about seeing Christ in the eyes of the least of all – the sick, the troubled, the disadvantaged and the poor. Medicine is about relationships, not just doctor and patient, allow yourself to participate by providing alms to take care of the community you serve. We are not for profit. We believe that begging is becoming, as the history of Christianity has shown for millennia. Every year since our beginning in 1994, 30-40% percent of our practice has fewer patients and depends on them all. Our model allows us to provide comfort and care when the reductionist biomedical model fails.
Second, our essence is “Comprehensive, Collaborative, Restorative, Integrative Women’s Health”. Fertility awareness is harnessed to the fullest, rather than being controlled and shut down and viewed as being polluted with class one carcinogens. Instead of treating unborn children as a sexually transmitted disease, the unborn child is our second patient. Instead of using embryos as property, children and offspring must be loved and nurtured unconditionally. Rather than seeing relapses as someone else’s problem to fix and a waste of precious time, we do what we can to support our patients. Instead of pitting the mother against her child in an elective abortion, we collaborate with regional pregnancy centers. Without judgment, we tell the truth. Instead of viewing a sick unborn child in the womb as a receptacle for pain and unnecessary suffering and ending the life of the person/child with that illness, we offer perinatal hospice.
What should the post-Row, pro-life movement focus on?
The science of meaning and logic of words is now “transhuman”. What I mean is that we are overstepping human limits in nihilistic ways without a guiding star outside of ourselves and our thoughts. it’s very dangerous.
As I’ve learned in my past, without the foundation of science, logic, and abba compassion—which is the unity of faith and reason—we are lost. It is the breaking of that unity that has led to the sterilizing table in the 1930s, the gas chamber in the 1940s, and now the abortion mills and chemical abortions of today.
In a post-Ro-Ro world, we must continue political advocacy and scientific inquiry. We must develop the model we created in Tepeyac—to serve human flourishing, to cooperate with fertility, and not to transform or eliminate our children as sexually transmitted diseases. Finally, we must continue the conversion of heart. As I experience medicine in general, my primary way of moving forward in my field of OB/GYN is to fight the current culture of lies by being intentional and in the knowledge of the truth rather than just talking about it. We must be witnesses. By the grace of God, and in sacrificial connection with others, we can provide a light in the darkness and show that the path forward in medicine must be toward care, healing, and wholeness.
Source- aleteia