For years, Dr George Delgado falsely claimed an affiliation to a prestigious US medical school and his assertions about ‘reversal’ procedure have been denounced

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

A doctor who has said he invented a procedure to “reverse” abortion has for years falsely claimed an affiliation to a prestigious US medical school, the Guardian can reveal.

A medication abortion is an FDA-approved procedure and is administered through two doses of medicine over 48 hours. Medication abortions now represent nearly one-third of all abortions nationally, according to the Guttmacher Institute. There is no reversal procedure.

But Dr George Delgado, the medical director of Culture of Life Family Services in San Diego, claims to have invented a “reversal”, in which women are given a large dose of progesterone following the first dose of a medicated abortion.

Delgado’s assertions about the “reversal” procedure have been denounced as “unproven and unethical” in a statement from America’s largest association of women’s doctors, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. His work has been described as an “unmonitored research experiment” in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Despite condemnation from the medical community, Delgado’s claims have been adopted by some Republican state legislators as part of a wider campaign to undermine women’s reproductive rights. North Dakota legislators recently passed a law forcing doctors to tell patients medication abortions are reversible, the fifth state to do so in 2019.

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The American Medical Association is now suing North Dakota for forcing doctors to “misinform their patients that medication abortion may be ‘reversible’, which is contrary to science”, and said the law forced “physicians ‘[to] convey ideological, government-mandated messages that are false or misleading’.”

Delgado has been listing an affiliation with the University of California San Diego (UCSD), even after the university asked him to stop last year.

Delgado worked in UCSD’s department of family medicine as a voluntary clinical associate professor beginning in 2005, but left in June 2011, according to the school. The school could not describe the scope of Delgado’s duties, but said his position was unpaid, and may have been “as little as teaching a class once a year”, according to the university spokesperson Scott LaFee.

Since 2011, Delgado has practiced at the Culture of Life Family Services clinic in California, where he provides Catholic-oriented “pro-life” medicine. The clinic advertises “Christ-centered medical care”.

The Culture of Life Family Services clinics in Escondido and San Diego, California, were included in successful applications for federal family planning funding approved by the Trump administration. The two clinics were listed as “sub-recipients” in a $5.9m grant proposal submitted to the Trump administration by the Obria Group. Obria would later be awarded $1.7m per year.

Obria Group, through the Republican crisis communications firm CRC Public Relations, said the clinics were not included on the “final list” of sub-recipients for the $1.7m grant, but did not elaborate, or say which clinics were on the final list. CRC also said the abortion “reversal” is “not reimbursable in the Title X program”.

The Guardian repeatedly tried to reach the Culture of Life Family Services clinic, but an office manager did not return multiple phone inquiries.

In the grant proposal, Culture of Life Family Services committed to care for 750 low-income women seeking family planning services. The amount of federal funds the clinic would have received is redacted in a copy of the federal grant application seen by the Guardian.

Delgado appears to have listed an affiliation with USCD since 2011, including in a December 2012 case report published in the Annals of Pharmacotherapy, and as recently as November 2018 in a speaker biography posted on the website Catholic Answers. That affiliation listed on Catholic Answers was removed after inquiries from the Guardian.

The anti-abortion Charlotte Lozier Institute website also listed Delgado as a “Voluntary Associate Clinical Professor at the UCSD School of Medicine” at the time of publication. He is not, three university officials said.

In response to emailed questions from the Guardian, Delgado said: “As soon as I received a copy of the letter from [University of California San Diego] I stopped listing an affiliation with UCSD.” He added that websites still listing the affiliation “must be using old quotes in their materials”.

He declined an interview request due to “work responsibilities”, and did not respond to further emailed inquiries, including about federal funding.

Delgado’s most recent work has included speaking engagements providing pseudo-scientific cover for anti-abortion campaigners attacking medication abortions as they grow increasingly common. Delgado has also pushed the false claim that abortion is linked to breast cancer.

The UCSD School of Medicine said Delgado, “was instructed” by his former department to stop using the school’s name after he cited it as his affiliation in a widely criticized, and briefly retracted, April 2018 paper.

When the article was again released, Delgado listed the Steno Institute as his research institution. The Steno Institute was registered with the California secretary of state on 24 July 2018 by Delgado, with a mission “to further abortion pill reversal and other pro-life research”.

While the abortion pill reversal is often described as a “treatment” in media releases from anti-abortion groups, Delgado only has published one case report of six patients in a medical journal.

Another article published by Delgado, in a fringe legal journal called Issues in Law & Medicine, was temporarily retracted for overstating the level of review by an institutional review board, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.

“The bottom line is there is no evidence this treatment is effective,” said Dr Daniel Grossman, a professor of gynecology at the University of California San Francisco’s Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health.

Grossman wrote an analysis published in the New England Journal of Medicine last year describing Delgado’s work as an “unmonitored research experiment”, and adding that laws forcing physicians to tell women about it were “a disturbing intrusion into the relationship between physicians and their patients”.

He told the Guardian: “This clearly is research, and research must be done under the review of an institutional review board or an independent review panel.”

“Patients need to be given informed consent about any research they may participate in so they understand the potential risks benefits and alternatives to this experimental treatment.”

Medication abortions rely on two medications taken 48 hours apart to induce an abortion: mifepristone followed by misoprostol. Mifepristone blocks progesterone, which leads to the disruption of a pregnancy. The second medication is required because a termination will not be successful in up to 48% of women, some studies have found.