ARTICLES

They Thought I Was Crazy

A GROWING NUMBER OF CATHOLIC DOCTORS WON'T PRESCRIBE CONTRACEPTIVES

Contraception is everywhere. Walk into a drug store or a large supermarket, and you'll more than likely find boxes of condoms hanging from a shelf. Behind the counter, the pharmacist has an ample supply of the Pill. Local clinics, student health services, family doctors, social service agencies all either have prophylactics or can tell you pretty quickly how to get some, perhaps even free.

To be sure, the Roman Catholic Church officially teaches that using artificial means to prevent conception is a grave moral error. Yet even though most Catholics have heard about the Vatican's condemnation of contraception, there's a lingering feeling among many pew-sitters that the Church doesn't really mean it. "Everyone knows the Pope says it, but it's hard to find a priest who will really stand up for it," says Dr. Kim Hardey, an obstetrician-gynecologist in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Finding a doctor to assist contraception is no problem. The hard thing is to find a doctor who won't. The debate over abortion ebbs and flows; there is no debate over contraception. "You know, in medical school we are taught pretty much a secular mindset, and contraceptives are a given," says Dr. Ted O'Donnell, a family doctor in East Wenatchee, Washington, "...like penicillin is a given for strep throat. The use of contraceptives is never questioned."

Drs. Hardey and O'Donnell are two of 160 listed in a directory of physicians who do not sterilize, abort, prescribe artificial contraception or refer patients to doctors who will. The 60-page book was published last June by One More Soul, a nonprofit educational organization in Dayton, Ohio. Of the medical specialists who most often field requests for contraception, the directory includes 26 active obstetrician-gynecologists, who deliver babies and treat women's health; 11 pediatricians, whose patients include adolescent girls; and 65 active family doctors, who see a little of everything.

Instead of pills or plastic, these physicians offer natural family planning. While often confused with the discredited "rhythm method," Natural Family Planning has a much higher rate of success -- more than 98 percent, its supporters claim.

Still, natural family planning is not well known. Even if it were, it comes with a built-in impediment for a sex-centered society: periodic abstinence. Artificial contraception, by contrast, is quick and simple, and requires little sacrifice; its only tangible consequences are long term. For doctors, spurning the Pill is a lonely decision. When they made the call, few anti-contraception doctors knew any other doctors who ever did such a thing. By contrast, they knew lots of patients who used contraception, and they wondered if their stand on principle would be financially tenable. "The biggest argument I hear is: 'It's 30 percent of my income, I can't afford to do it,'" says Steve Koob, director of One More Soul.

Koob's list of physicians, though growing, is small in absolute terms, and microscopic relative to the total number of physicians in the country. (On the other hand, for every doctor he has been able to identify, surely there are three or four others of whom he is unaware.) "This is kind of like the pioneer stage," says Dr. Michael Aiello, a radiologist and president of the Catholic Physicians Guild of Rochester, New York. "And maybe it's going to take 100 years to try to change it."

Many doctors who reject contraception have undergone what they describe as a conversion experience -- not necessarily from another religious denomination, but towards a fully Catholic philosophy of life. Through painful small steps, they have come to believe that helping others contracept is immoral. Then they have acted on that belief. Says Dr. Beverly McMillan, an obstetrician-gynecologist in Jackson, Mississippi: "I think it was really just a slow opening up of my eyes by God."

Dr. Kim Hardey, an obstetrician-gynecologist, links his embrace of Roman Catholic teaching on human life to his son Brad. The day Brad was born in 1981, his father became solidly anti-abortion. But the doctor and his wife, Bonnie, used contraception religiously. Mrs. Hardey had some misgivings about it, but Dr. Hardey had no doubts. "I was in my how-can-I-retire-soon-I'm-not-putting-anymore-kids-through-college mode," he says.

To all appearances, the Hardeys were committed Catholics. They attended church regularly. When the Hardeys were living in Dothan, Alabama, they were involved in a Catholic prayer group. One woman in the prayer group didn't use contraception and expressed disapproval of the others, but the others dismissed her as a loon.

In 1990, when Brad was 9, he was struck by a car and killed. The devastating loss persuaded Dr. Hardey that he and his wife had been acting selfishly. "When you lose one, you don't take them for granted anymore," he explains.

But while he had rejected contraception for himself, he was still prescribing it for his patients. He had some questions about it, but local priests counseled him that since most of his patients were Protestant, and since he had to make a living, it was okay. Then someone showed him a 1991 pastoral letter on the subject from Bishop Glennon Flavin of Lincoln, Nebraska, which condemned both the use of and cooperation with contraception. "I didn't want to take any chances that I would not get to Heaven...and not get to see my son again," he says. At the end of 1992, he told his partners he would no longer offer contraception. "It went over about as badly as you can imagine.... They really thought I was crazy, I guess."

The next year, the Hardeys moved to Lafayette, Louisiana, and Dr. Hardey opened his own practice. He had doubts about its viability, but it has worked. His staff presents new patients with a mission statement explaining that if they want their tubes tied, their baby terminated, or any kind of contraception prescribed, they've come to the wrong place. For those who want to delay child-bearing, he offers Natural Family Planning. In Lafayette, he's drawn support not only from patients but from some local priests. "I really believe that it's a lack of understanding -- that the Church sees the evil of contraception and wants to protect us from it," he says.

While he's convinced that natural family planning works, he admits it's not easy. "Our biggest obstacle to natural family planning in my opinion is the lack of chastity before marriage," he says. "For those who are chaste when they're dating, going without sex for ten days or so [each month] is not such a burden. The problem is when you've been living together and on the Pill, the idea of going without sex for a while is unbelievably bad."

Dr. Hardey is now 43. He and his wife have two children: Jennifer, 15, and Stephen, 5. He is so busy that at deadline he was trying to attract a partner.

Dr. Faith Daggs, 29, is the tenth of fourteen children raised in a Roman Catholic family in central New Jersey. As a student at Catholic University in Washington D.C., she stayed close to her faith, even attending daily Mass, but believed the Church was behind the times. "I used to think contraception was a good thing," Dr. Daggs says. "I was always really pro-life, but I figured: pro-choice before conception, pro-life after."

While she was at Georgetown University Medical School, she could see that her relationship with her boyfriend was heading toward a lifelong commitment. She remembers "wanting to have a marriage that was a sacrament, that wasn't something else."

She discussed contraception with her orthodox sister, prayed the Rosary and read Humanae Vitae, the 1968 encyclical of Pope Paul VI condemning contraception. The Pope's analysis of the consequences of contraception impressed her. She questioned how she could discount the authority of the Church. "I kind of realized I was being a hypocrite," she says.

In 1994, the same year she got married, she joined Regnum Christi, a lay movement of the Legionaries of Christ. (She and her husband, Paul, a lawyer who works as an insurance adjuster, have two children: Patrick, 2, and Brian, born last summer.) She's now in her second year of a four-year obstetrician-gynecology residency at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C. There are about 65 doctors in her department at the hospital. Most are Catholic. She's the only one she knows of who won't prescribe contraception.

At the clinics where Dr. Daggs works, if a married patient asks for contraception, she gives her information about natural family planning. If an unmarried patient asks for contraception, she touts the value of abstinence. If the patient still wants contraception, she tells her she'll have to go to another medical resident at the clinic.

While Dr. Daggs often feels alone, she's grateful that the other doctors generally tolerate her stand. "It's been difficult, because I've had to do some dancing around, but nobody has ever berated me for not wanting to do it," she says.

She even thinks her position may be resonating. Recently, when she refused to help a colleague perform a sterilization, that doctor apologetically recalled that he once declined to do them, too. "I know just hearing about natural family planning isn't going to change the mind of someone who's been prescribing contraception for a long time," she says, "but I think it kind of puts the idea in his head, and the Holy Spirit is going to do the rest."

When Dr. Ted O'Donnell and his wife Fran got married in 1974, they decided to use natural family planning. But as a physician in the U.S. Navy, and later during his residency at a naval hospital in California, Dr. O'Donnell prescribed oral contraceptives.

About 1980, he started thinking about going into practice with his mother, who was a family doctor in southern California. Dr. Jean O'Donnell, then about 60, told her son she refused to prescribe contraceptives. "[M]y mother's position challenged me to start looking at the Church's teaching seriously," he says. "...[W]as I going to accept the Church's teaching on faith, or was I going to practice a secular brand of medicine?"

Even though he didn't fully understand the Church's position at the time, he decided to cast his lot with Rome. "I had pretty strong faith at that time," he explains, "faith that God was leading my life."

His mother retired in 1987 to a Trappistine convent in Arizona (where at 77 she is now known as Sister Jean O'Donnell). In 1991, he moved to East Wenatchee, Washington, just east of the Cascades in the north central part of the state. His staff screens calls from new patients, letting them know what Dr. O'Donnell won't do. His practice is thriving.

"I think that the physicians who are Catholic who are prescribing contraceptives by and large are acting in ignorance and in good faith," he says. "You know, conversion is a process, not something that happens instantaneously. I think over time more Catholics are going to come to understand the Church's teaching."

Doctor Beverly McMillan opened the first abortion clinic in Mississippi in 1975. She was raised a Roman Catholic near the border of southwest Virginia and Tennessee, but she fell away from her faith while in college at the University of Tennessee. Later, in 1969, as a medical resident at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, she treated women who had undergone illegal half-done abortions. Her experience persuaded her that abortion ought to be legal and available.

She moved to Jackson, Mississippi in the fall of 1974, and started an obstetrics-gynecology practice. In December 1975, she opened Family Health Services, an abortion clinic. "I did this in my spare time as sort of a community service," she recalls.

Three months later, she met and became friends with a Protestant woman, who was privately horrified by what Dr. McMillan was doing. That woman began praying earnestly for her. Six months later, Dr. McMillan had a conversion experience, and started reading Scripture. She stopped performing abortions, instead scheduling affiliated doctors to do them. "I got to the point of, 'I think abortions are right, but somebody else will have to do them now,'" she says. "And I'm afraid that's the way a lot of people feel."

She closed the abortion clinic in December 1978. (In all, she estimates she performed between 200 and 500 abortions.) In the mid-'80s, her second husband, a Protestant pro-life activist, asked her if she were giving out oral contraceptives to unmarried women. She admitted she was, and had no answer when he suggested she was "supporting them in a lifestyle that is going to separate them from God for all eternity." She stopped.

In 1990, her father died. All six of his children attended his funeral. None could go to Communion. The experience seared Dr. McMillan. "I just felt that the Lord was saying, 'When Mom dies, I want somebody to be able to go to Communion at her funeral Mass.'"

She started re-learning her faith, including the Church's teaching on contraception. While others dismiss Humanae Vitae as cruel and out of-touch, Dr. McMillan finds in it the logic of love. Her favorite part is "when he says, by contracepting, you are not giving yourself entirely to each other.

"It's wildly romantic. It really is when you think about it."

In 1991, she re-entered the Church, and got her second marriage regularized. (Her first marriage, which had ended in divorce, was outside the Church.) She stopped giving out contraceptives of any kind. The stance has led to some heartfelt discussions with her patients, some of whom have stopped seeing her. But it has also attracted many others. Among her current patients are even a few for whom she performed abortions some 20 years ago, women who've taken similar journeys and arrived at the same place.

Her partnership, East Lakeland OBGYN Associates, which features four female doctors, is thriving. In mid-September 1997, Dr. McMillan's next open appointment was in February 1998. While Dr. McMillan, now 55, won't prescribe any contraceptives, the other physicians, all Protestants, will. "We have to sit down and have a talk some more with my partners," she says, in her soft drawl. "We're as pro-life as you get in Mississippi. We're not as pro-life as you're supposed to be."

Her husband entered the Church last Easter.

Reprinted with permission from the Winter 1998 issue of Sursum Corda magazine.