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Pro-Life Doctor recalls life in the trenches

Physicians must often confront life-and-death situations.  For Dr. Bill Hogan, however, this part of the job description had a double dimension.

His strong pro-life convictions not only profoundly affected how he performed his duties as an Ob-Gyn; they spilled over into the rest of his life, impelling him to become a major player in the battle against the Culture of Death.

At a Defend Life-sponsored March for Life kickoff lecture January 14 at Annunciation Church in Washington, D.C., Dr. Hogan told the audience that he had sensed the rumblings of a seismic change in the culture as early as the 1950s, when he was a medical student at Georgetown University.

Fortunately, however, Fr. Thomas O’Donnell, S.J., was there to give him “a wonderful foundation” in medical and moral ethics.

In 1960, he noted, a Catholic, John Rock, developed the birth control pill, effectively launching the sexual revolution.

The strength and breadth of this revolution became horrifyingly clear to Hogan in 1967 at Case Western University, where he was chief resident of obstetrics and gynecology, when he attended a lecture given by a Catholic Ob-Gyn from Czechoslovakia.

“I got in late to the front row of the auditorium,” he recalled.  “It was packed with medical students, residents and nurses.

“The doctor said that a year or two before in Czechoslovakia, they had aborted 107 children for every 100 children that were born.

“The auditorium erupted in applause.  For the first time, I realized we were in deep trouble.”

By 1968, pro-life and anti-life forces were lining up in battle formation:  state after state was passing liberal abortion laws, and pro-life organizations were forming all over the country.

At Suburban Hospital in the nation’s capitol, where Hogan was director of medical education for obstetrics and gynecology, a pathologist with whom he had become friends came up to him and handed him a manila envelope.

“Bill, I think you’ll be interested in this,” he said.

Inside the envelope were “terrible” lab slides of the remains of aborted babies.

Hogan and his friend, Dr. Bill Colliton, secretly solicited the help of other pathologists in hospitals around Washington, who gave them more slides.  They worked with Dr. Jack Willke of Cincinnati, who was doing the same thing.

They combined these slides with the beautiful pictures of unborn babies taken by Life magazine photographer Leonard Nilssen, then hit the lecture circuit.

Hogan’s first talk, delivered at a National Association of Social Workers convention, was a rude initiation.  He knew the audience was going to be tough when he noticed that the lady seated next to him on stage was wearing earrings in the shape of IUDs.

“I showed the pictures of a normal child,” he said.  “Then I showed the abortion photos.

“The hatred was palpable – it just welled up out of the audience.  No one would speak to me; everyone was surly.  I was lucky to get out of there with my life!”

That night he got a phone call from a social worker, an ex-priest, who told him, “I know they gave you a hard time today, but I want you to know that you changed two minds to pro-life.”

“When I heard that, I felt ten feet tall!” he said.

While Hogan and his friends were giving pro-life talks, the doctor’s brother, Larry Hogan, was elected to Congress.

“I told him, ‘We have to do something about abortion.’  He said, ‘I don’t want to touch it.’  I said, ‘Larry, you’ve got to see this.’

“I ran through the slides with him; he was mesmerized.”

For the next six years, Larry became the leading pro-life spokesman in the House and Senate.

“He introduced the pro-life amendment; he and I both defended it before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.  I was very proud of my brother.”

In the meantime, in his Ob-Gyn practice, Dr. Hogan always fought on the side of life.

He would often receive patients sent to him by crisis pregnancy centers.

When he realized that one woman they had sent to him mistakenly assumed he was going to do an abortion, he gently tried to dissuade her by describing how developed her baby was.

Realizing what he was up to, the woman angrily bolted out of her chair and ran for the door.  

“I know you’re under a lot of stress, but will you please come back tomorrow?” Hogan pleaded.

She left in an angry huff, but came back the next day, and the doctor continued his gentle cajoling.

His most persuasive moment, he believes, came when he said, “If you put the baby up for adoption, you may not get to know her.  But when you are 85 years old or so and in heaven, you will be the mother of this child for all eternity!”

The woman had the baby, placed it for adoption and, several years later, phoned Hogan from Pennsylvania to tell him she was married and had just learned she was pregnant.

“I wanted you to be the first to know!” she said.

Another of Hogan’s patients in the 1970s underwent a toxemia pregnancy, for which she was hospitalized for a month.  At 23 weeks her kidneys stopped working and she went into a coma.

The doctor performed a Caesarian.  The baby was dead.  The woman remained in a coma for two weeks afterwards.

The next year she was pregnant again.

“I told her, ‘You came as close to death as anyone.  If you go to any doctor in the state, he will tell you to have an abortion for health reasons.  I will take good care of you, but I can’t say what the outcome will be.’”

In the coming months, said Hogan, “We covered her like a blanket.  We saw her every week, and called in specialists of all kinds.”

When the patient was 33 weeks pregnant, Hogan got a phone call.  The woman had had the baby at home by herself.

“I sent an ambulance out.  She came in with a 4-pound, 4-ounce baby.  She was fine, the baby was fine!”

Although he was strongly anti-abortion, in his practice, Dr. Hogan prescribed contraceptive pills.

At Georgetown University Hospital, he had become friends with Andre Hellegers, a professor of Ob-Gyn who had been a pro-contraceptive member of the commission appointed by Pope John XXIII to study the issue of contraception.

“I had a number of talks with Hellegers about this,” said Hogan.  “He said, ‘You can go to any priest, and he will tell you to use your own judgment, follow your own conscience.’”

So Hogan did – until 1977, when he was pressured by a friend to attend an “evening of recollection” at the Opus Dei Center in Washington.

“This was the time when Catholic churches were having Masses with clowns and balloons,” he said.

But as he listened to the Opus Dei priest, he thought, “This is the faith I grew up with.”

Another Opus Dei priest named Fr. Bob Connor told him he would have to stop prescribing contraceptives.

“I said, ‘I won’t be able to feed my children if I do that!’”

But Father Connor kept trying to persuade him that prescribing contraceptives was wrong.

“He was at my house, at my office; he would follow me on the parking lot of the hospital.

“One time, I said, ‘I can’t talk to you now, I’ve got two women in labor!’  He said, ‘We can talk between contractions.’”

Finally, out of desperation for a definitive answer to his dilemma, Hogan phoned his old teacher of medical ethics at Georgetown, Father O’Donnell, who was living at a seminary in Kentucky.

The old priest didn’t mince words.

“Bill, you are cooperating in a grave moral evil,” he warned.  “You cannot do that.”

Hogan met with the four doctors with whom he shared a practice and told them he was going to leave because he could no longer prescribe the birth control pill.

“They said, ‘Don’t do that!  We’ll restructure the practice.’”

Since then, two of the other doctors have stopped prescribing contraceptives as well.

Dr. Hogan urged his listeners not to let the terrible things that often happen in the Culture of Death get them depressed, anxious or upset.

“God is not asleep at the switch; God is in charge,” he said, pointing to the conversions of Norma McCorvey of Roe v. Wade and of abortionists such as Bernard Nathanson, Carol Everett and Anthony Levantino.

“Where does the grace come from for these conversions?  It comes from the fact that in our sufferings, we are co-redeemers with Christ.

“All this is part of His plan; it is contributing to the redemption of mankind.”