A Patient is a Person, No Matter How Small

A patient is a person no matter how small, whether that is a patient like us or whether this is a patient on the inside of the womb. Today on Focus on the Family, we have a fascinating look at a medical perspective on the sanctity of preborn life. Thanks for joining us. Your host is Focus president and author Jim Daly and I'm John Fuller.

That's right, John. Dr. Bill Lisle is our guest today. He's been on the broadcast twice in the past two years and he always brings a lot of energy to the pro-life topic.

Oh, he does. He's so well-spoken. Dr. Lisle is a board-certified obstetrician, a gynecologist, and he has an active private practice where he has delivered over 4,000 babies. He's also a medical instructor and an amazing pro-life speaker, as you're about to hear. And this presentation has a lot of visuals. You'll want to visit our website and watch this presentation to get the full picture, so to speak.

You'll find the link in the episode notes. Here now is Dr. Bill Lisle speaking at a Bringing America Back to Life conference. It was sponsored by Cleveland Right to Life on today's episode of Focus on the Family. Well, good morning. My name is Dr. Bill Lisle and I practice obstetrics and gynecology and it is an honor to be invited. It's an honor to be here. I love my job, but I love this. I have a passion for this.

I have a passion for teaching. We want to give you the tools that you can convince your family, your friends, your colleagues that we are created in the image of God from that moment of conception and all preborn need to be defended and protected. So who created new life? God did. Genesis 1 26, and God said, Let us make man in our image.

None of the other parts of creation were created in the image of God. We as individuals were all created in the image of God. Well, the question is, well, when were we created in the image of God?

I mean, am I up at two o'clock in the morning? Somebody's been pushing for two hours and it's like, nope, no image of God yet. No image of God yet.

The baby comes out and then I deliver the baby and I hold it like I'm at the Mufasa and I say, Behold, the image of God. No, that's not when we were created in the image of God. How about when we do that first ultrasound and we can see that heart beating on the inside? Is that when we were created in the image of God? No, the only biologic sense is that we were created in the image of God at that moment of conception. When one cell from the mom and one cell from the dad got together, that's when we were created in the image of God. Well, when does science say life begins?

I'm going to show you what happens with mammalian cells. Now, let's talk about conception and we're going to talk about it politely, all right? When it comes to conception, we have two people that are involved in this story. We have the mom's side of the family and we have the dad's side of the family. Mom produces one egg for this party. Guys, can we get by with just one?

No. We are over here and it might be 400 million, maybe 500 million of our cells to accomplish what she is providing with one egg. So the moment of conception happens and now everybody thinks they're Michael Phelps, you know, and everybody is on the starting track and they're all ready to swim. And the gun goes off and then all of them are swimming across and then they get to the top of the uterus and they have a choice. What's their choice? Do we make a left turn or do we make a right turn?

They do not ask for direction. So half of them go to the wrong side. They go out the left tube and they get to the end and they go, there's no egg. And the other half go to the right and they, we've got an egg.

But guess what? Now it's not a matter of getting to the egg. Now they have to fight to see who gets on the inside.

Now the real battle begins. God designed conception so that there was only a gold medalist in this race. There is no silver.

There is no bronze because diastereomy is not consistent with life. So just like on Star Trek, you know, if you come up and there's Klingons all over the place, what does the captain say? He goes, shields up. Well guess what God did?

He did the same thing. As soon as Michael Phelps burrows his way into that egg and that miracle of conception happens and fertilization has happened, at that moment shields go up and it's called the zona pellucida. When that zona pellucida, that protective shield goes up around the egg and says no mas to all the other guys who are all losers, who did that, all that swimming and racing, fernata. You know, as soon as that happens, there's a depolarization of zinc ions.

What does that mean? It means that there is actually a flash of light at that moment of conception. And this is what you see when that happens with, I mean, there is literally a flash of light when you look at the right frequency of light. So when we hear people say, well we really don't know when life begins, there's a flash of light. What more do you need than a flash of light to say, bam, that's when life just occurred. Whenever somebody does that pregnancy test and they go, oh my goodness, I'm pregnant.

You know, this is time to celebrate. I need to go to my doctor's office. They want the ultrasound. You know, you show them the ultrasound and where they went on the next visit, another ultrasound.

This is what shows the life on the inside. That is the patient, that is the person that is there within the womb and that who we must defend. Anybody here ever had surgery before?

I see all this gray hair, y'all all had surgery, admit to it. You know, my daughter had to have her tonsils out, you know, over Christmas. She was asleep, she was under anesthesia, she could feel no pain, she could not respond to anything. Was she still a patient and was she still a person even though she couldn't respond and communicate?

Yes. When you had your surgeries, even though you could not respond and you could not feel pain, were you still a person? Yes, you were still a person. If I'm operating and I mess up and somebody dies, do I go out to the family and say, you know what, I'm sorry, grandma passed away, we kind of messed up, but she was under general anesthesia, so it's okay.

She felt no pain while she was anesthesia. No. A patient is a person no matter how small, whether that is a patient like us sitting at tables or whether this is a patient on the inside of the womb. ACOG. ACOG is not pro-life.

ACOG is the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. And ACOG in their practice bulletin number 439 is talking about informed consent. Informed consent is not just a form that you sign. Informed consent is a process. It is a process where the risks, benefits, indications, and alternatives are described to you before you have a procedure done.

Well, look at what they say. Seeking informed consent expresses respect for the patient as a person. Patient as a person. So if I want to defend the pre-born, I need to prove that they are a person. So my next step according to ACOG's statement is then all I have to do is show that they are a patient on the inside, and that's what we're going to do. We're going to talk about how we treat the pre-born as patients in the womb. The technology has just changed just over the past year, and it is changing month by month on the procedures that we are able to do to save the lives of the pre-born. This is a great example. We do a lot of pro-life apologetics training for men.

This is one of the examples that we'll give to men, so when they're talking with their colleagues, they're talking with their friends, they can use this example and they can say, hey, how about this? What's a delayed interval delivery? We had a patient a couple years ago came to Pensacola, and this happens around the country so much that it doesn't even make the news anymore. This mom came to Pensacola. There was a concert going on in Pensacola.

It might have been Toby Mac, I think it was. She's 25 weeks pregnant with identical twins, one egg, one sperm, you know, conceived at the same moment in time, and somehow before day 13 divided into two exact copies, and she is there and she's just swaying to the music with Toby Mac there, and all of a sudden, bam, we have a baptism up on the front because she just broke her bag of water. It's like, oh my goodness, I don't think I'll be able to stay for the rest of the concert.

No, you will not, you know. So she comes to our hospital. She comes to Sacred Heart Hospital. Before we could do anything, she delivered that first baby, the identical twin. That identical twin goes over to our NICU, all the doctors, all the nurses, and all the technology, and that baby is being cared for. The other twin still has an intact sack of water. Our maternal fetal medicine doctors went up and said, you know what, we have two NICUs in our hospital. We have the ones with all the doctors, nurses, and technology, and we have the one that was created by God, and this one is actually doing a better job.

As long as this baby in the womb is doing well, we'd like to keep this baby in the womb, and then when we get to that point where this baby needs to go to that NICU, we will, but for right now, we're going to use this one. Well, guess what? Do we get hours? Oh yeah. Do we get days?

Oh yeah. Do we get weeks? There was a case up in Tennessee just recently, six and a half weeks. You have one baby that is born in June. You have its identical twin born in August. You go to register them for school, and this one is in first grade, and this one is in kindergarten, and they're identical twins.

The technology is amazing, but here's the real key. One egg, one sperm conceived at the same moment in time before day 13, they divide up into identical copies. One baby is in the NICU. One baby is in the womb. If mom were to choose, she could legally say, you know what, I know we had two, but I really only wanted one. You know, two is just going to be a lot of a hassle.

I'm fine with this one. She could legally go to Virginia. She could legally go to New York, and she goes, you know what, I just don't want the second one, and she could legally take the life of an identical twin conceived at the same moment in time. This baby has rights and protection like if I was in a cardiac care unit, yet the baby that is in the womb that is the exact copy identical twin does not have those rights. Our rights come from God. It is the duty of the state to protect those rights, and it is not dependent on our geographic location where one identical twin is over in the NICU and the other twin is in the womb.

That is a great example for our guys to take home when they have their pro-life apologetics training. But we're actually doing heart surgery now on the babies on the inside. We are doing heart surgery and spine surgery at 22 weeks gestation. How do you do heart surgeries? Let's talk about aortic stenosis. What is aortic stenosis? The left ventricle contracts.

It puts blood out to the rest of the body. When that left ventricle contracts, it goes through the aorta. If that aorta is normal, you hear a phew, phew, phew, phew. If the aorta is closed, you don't hear that sound.

You hear wee, wee, wee, wee. If we don't do something and open up that valve, that baby will die of heart failure on the inside. So what do we do? We guide a needle. Ultrasound guidance. We go through the mom's belly. We go up to the wall of the uterus. We go right up to the baby's chest. We introduce that needle, not just into the baby's chest, not just into that baby's heart. We then thread it up into the aortic valve, which is all closed.

We inflate the balloon at the end of that, and we blow up that valve a little bit. Within 60 seconds, we see dramatic improvements of that baby's blood flow. Is that treating them as a patient on the inside? We're doing valvuloplasty. We're now doing septoplasty, and we're doing neurosurgery, spinal surgery, at 22 weeks gestation, right at the earliest cusp of when a baby could even think of surviving on the outside. Yet we're doing heart surgery, and we're doing neurosurgery on these babies.

But you know what? There's a bioethicist from the Journal of Medical Ethics who says, you know what? Doyle and Ward suggest that a woman's autonomy may be threatened if fetuses are regarded as patients in their own right.

That was in 2011. Well, I got news for her. We do treat them as patients on the inside.

And because mom is a patient, mom is an amazing life support system, but baby is also a patient. Have you all done this before? 23andMe, Ancestry Doc, I did it. It's pretty cool. You know, you give them $50, they send you a little tube, you drool in it for five minutes, and you send it off, and it tells you your family tree.

This is mine. I am 38% Eastern European. Of course, I underlined it 29% Irish when I was in Ireland last week. That's my family history. That is my story. Did this story start when I was born? When my mama pushed me out that all of a sudden I have 38% this, 29%, 12% that?

No. In fact, if you were doing a study when I was one cell, one cell from my mom's side of the family, one cell from my dad's side of the family, if you were to look at that DNA of that one cell, guess what? It will be the exact same report. This was my 23andMe report, whether I am 55 years of age or whether I have just been conceived, and my total number of cells is one. That is scientific proof.

That is genetics. Opioids, narcotics. We have a problem with this in Florida. I know that out here in Ohio, you don't have a narcotic or opioid problem at all, right? Yeah. Who am I kidding? You have a problem.

I have a problem. It's inner city. It's rural. It's suburban.

It is across the country. In fact, 2017 we had 72,000 people in the United States die of overdoses. What's one agent that's used to save those lives? Narcan. If you haven't seen Narcan work, it is a Disney movie. This is Sleeping Beauty that is out, cannot respond to pain, cannot breathe. There is just a heartbeat. We give them a shot of Narcan and they will just rise like Lazarus.

They will be up and go, well, how did I get here? Narcan's an amazing drug. But you know what? We have another blight going across this country. More so than narcotics. It is RU-46, Mifepristone, the abortion pill. And do not confuse the abortion pill with the morning after pill, which was 72 hours. That was 72 hours. This is 70 days.

Where it can be 98% effective in taking the life of a baby in the womb with this medicine called RU-46. Anybody here ever work as a server? No waiters? Okay. If the chef has a special and he says, today's special is meatloaf and you're selling the meatloaf. And then the chef says 86 the meatloaf.

What does that mean to you? Kill it. Meatloaf's done. We're out of it. Kill it. Kill the special. Look at this drug. It's a question. Are you for 86ing this pregnancy, this baby that's there on the inside? That's the way I remember it as I served myself through college. 39% of all the abortions in the United States are now chemical abortions with this because this is the business model of Planned Parenthood.

Because the profit margin is higher. Again, 98% effective. Well, how does it work? A woman gets pregnant. Husbands, you know this. There are a couple changes that happened when your wife got pregnant. Lots of different changes. Well, there is a lot of change and there are a lot of instruments in this orchestra.

But guess what? There's one conductor. You have the orchestra tuning and getting ready at the beginning of a concert. It doesn't sound real great until the maestro walks out.

The maestro walks out and all of a sudden everybody is going to be playing together. The conductor in the orchestra of pregnancy is a hormone called progesterone. Progesterone is what keeps the pregnancy going.

It is the one that announces, hey, congratulations. We are pregnant. We are not going to have a cycle. We're going to divert resources and we're going to support this pregnancy. IU 46 successfully blocks that hormone signal, the progesterone. Progesterone is a hormone that we use in obstetrics all the time. We use it to prevent preterm labor. We use it to prevent recurrent miscarriage. If somebody had IVF in vitro fertilization at a different place, guess what? Mom was not expecting a pregnancy to arrive.

So what do they do at their centers? They put them on progesterone to keep this pregnancy going. This is not some black box drug over on the shelf.

It's something that I use every day on my patients on the inside. ACOG, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists will tell you nobody regrets having their abortion. Nobody regrets taking the abortion pill.

Abortion pill reversal is ridiculous because nobody has regrets. What are we looking at? Golden Gate Bridge. What city? San Francisco. 1800 people have jumped off that bridge attempting suicide. 1800. Does everybody who jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge die?

No. In fact, they know that 29 people survived. In fact, a psychologist out in San Francisco tracked down and interviewed those 29 people. What did she find out? And listen to what they're saying and listen to somebody and compare that in your mind with somebody who's walking into an abortion clinic.

They all said, I walked out onto the Golden Gate Bridge. Nobody loves me. Nobody cares for me. I have no hope. I have no other options.

The world would be better without me. 29 people jumped off and survived, but guess what? When a psychologist interviewed them, they all had that story.

All of them also said, as soon as I saw that bridge up above me, I cried out to God, and I said, save me. I don't want to die. Did they have regrets?

Yes. Do people walk into an abortion clinic with that same mentality? Nobody loves me. Nobody cares for me. I have no hope. The world would be better without my baby.

Yes. Do we see women having regrets and contacting our hotline right after? Usually, my experience, I've successfully reversed six abortion pills, and we've had healthy moms, healthy babies, and most of our calls come from the parking lot or on their way home where they have that immediate regret. So we have a network, an abortion pill rescue network. We have a toll-free number.

We have nurses that are manning it 24-7. We have trained over 500 doctors in the protocol and policies and safeties of abortion pill reversal. In December, we had baby number 1,000 that we were able to save through the abortion pill reversal network. That's myself.

That's Dr. George Delgado. This is one of the first pregnancies that I was able to successfully reverse. You know, beautiful baby. It was quite a trip. Mom named the baby Journey.

All right, but let me tell you about the most recent one that I had. Mom lived in Destin. She was nine weeks pregnant. She tried to get into the abortion clinic in Tallahassee.

They were too busy. She had to drive all the way to Jacksonville, Florida, six hours away. She gets the abortion pill, and she's now driving home on Interstate 10. And guess what? She sees one of those billboards that said, Heartbeat at 18 days. Who put that sign up?

I don't know. Then she drives a little bit further, and she sees another billboard that says, Your mom chose life. You should, too. All of a sudden, she's like, Oh, my gosh.

What have I done? She pulls off the arrest area, and she looks up an antidote for the abortion pill. She finds our network, calls our hotline, speaks with the nurse. Nurse gets the information. She calls me. I call the patient, get all the information, find out what her pharmacy is, and I call in the reversal medication.

She drives all the way home to Destin, Florida. She gets to her pharmacy. She takes the medication. Seven hours after she took the abortion pill, she has just started the reversal therapy. She is now 37 weeks pregnant in my practice, and she better not deliver this weekend.

But she is now 37 weeks pregnant, and she has a healthy mom, and she's going to have a healthy baby. So when God and the Holy Spirit talk to you and say, Hey, I want you to get involved in this pregnancy center. I want you to get involved in this ministry. I want you to teach Sunday school.

I want you to get involved in the nursery. Listen to what he's saying. God talked to somebody and said, Put up a billboard. God said to another person, Put up a billboard. Do I know who these people are?

No. God works in a chain, and we are all links in that chain. This person put up a billboard. This person put up a billboard. This nurse was working over at the hotline.

And you know what else is amazing? The pharmacist was involved in this, too. How was the pharmacist involved? Because when I called her, and I told her what I wanted, she said, Are you trying to reverse an abortion?

I said, Yes, ma'am, I am. And I want to give you my credit card number because I don't want the patient to have to pay for it. She goes, Oh, sweetie, don't worry about that. She goes, I'm going to take care of this girl. She goes, I'm going to pay for this medication out of my own pocket. Have I met this pharmacist before? No, I have never met that pharmacist.

But that's how God works. He takes a bunch of blinks. I don't want to be the missing link.

I don't want to be the link that dropped the ball and the chain was not effective. What did it cost? $109. $109 worth of medication to save the life of that baby. You have a baby whose mom has taken the abortion pill, has a 90% chance of walking to death, yet we invest $109 and we buy back the life of that baby. What's the spiritual word for buying back? We redeemed that baby. This is an example we use at churches and a lot of people say, you know, I knew redeemed was good. I knew it was a positive thing, but I really didn't understand it.

Now they understand it. ACOG also says the so-called abortion pill reversal is unproven and unethical. This is the same group that advocates for taking the lives of the baby and now has a fellowship where you can spend an extra year after training where you can learn to do a third trimester abortion because they do not feel that there is enough supply of abortion as to fulfill the need. So is it a choice?

Well, when I look at it and we see 62 million lives, this is not a choice like coffee or tea over on the side. We are engaged in a spiritual battle and if you are engaged in a spiritual battle, it would be better to use the right tools. So what does the Bible say? Psalm 139, you formed my inmost being. You knit me in my mother's womb. I praise you so wonderfully you made me. The psalmist is saying, man, it was a night of romance nine months ago when a baby came out and I'm like, I don't understand how that happened, but I knew that it had to be God.

God created that miracle and knit you in your mother's womb. Jeremiah 1.5, before I formed thee in the belly, I knew thee, and before thou came us forth out of the womb, I sanctified you and I ordained thee a prophet unto nations. God had a relationship with Jeremiah and wanted him to serve his cause. Galatians 1.15, but he who had set me apart, Paul is saying, before I was born, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles.

God knew what Paul's role was going to be in his kingdom even before he was born. Quickly, the stats, 47 years, 62 million lives. California's population is 40 million, 20 million in Florida. We have taken the lives of every man, woman, and child in the state of California and the state of Florida.

My stats in Florida? Well, we have abortions, yes. We have people die. We have people born. That's Florida State Stadium at our capital.

Our state motto is, In God We Trust. We have 75,000 people at a Florida State game that same year. How many abortions were performed?

76,000. We're going to lose in a stadium full of babies year after year after year just in the state of Florida. Kingdom service, you know, we're going to get maybe 70, 80, 90 years, and then free medical advice, y'all, you're all going to die. You're all going to die.

Unless Jesus comes, you're all going to die, and then we're going to be face to face with Jesus. And we're going to think about, what did I do for kingdom service? I'm here for all eternity, yet what did I do for kingdom service while I was here? And God put that little thought in my head and said, I want you to be involved in this ministry.

I want you to be involved in that ministry. What did we do? Well, what is our goal? Our goal is to look back on how we spent our lives here on earth and say, you know what, I did my best. I tried to serve the kingdom.

We want Jesus to, I mean, we're going to be saying, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, and we want Jesus to look at us, look us in the eye and say, well done, thou good and faithful servant. So, who did Jesus come to save? All of us sinners. You know, when we look over in Romans 5-8, but God demonstrates his own love for us in this, while we were still sinners, Jesus died for us.

I mean, I'm in that category. Anybody else here a sinner? I mean, I'm in there, no doubt about it, but look at this in Psalms in the NIV. When it talks about sinners, surely I was sinful at birth, but hey, hey, hey, I was sinful from the time my mother conceived me. So, if Jesus came to earth and lived the perfect life and then gave his life on the cross, conquered death for all sinners, and we were sinners from the time we were conceived, then Jesus died for the preborn.

So, if God loves us enough that he would send his son, his only son, live a perfect life, die on the cross for us, be buried for three days, then conquer death, and if we believe that, we can spend eternity with him. If God has that much love for you, if God has that much love for me, and if God has that much love for the preborn, then guess what? If God loves the preborn that much, then I must have that much love for the preborn. And if I love the preborn as much as God loves the preborn, then I will not be able to rest until I have protection and safety for every preborn from the moment of conception.

God bless you all, and thank you very much. Well, what a passionate message from OB-GYN Dr. Bill Lisle on this episode of Focus on the Family. Boy, John, that was such a convicting message from Dr. Lisle, and I know many of our listeners share his passion, and that's why Focus on the Family launched our Option Ultrasound Program, which has saved the lives of almost half a million babies since 2004. Through the years, we've been able to do that. Fifty-four percent of abortion-minded women who have counseling and an ultrasound will choose life.

That's the power of the visual image. If you haven't donated to Support Option Ultrasound, can I encourage you to do so today? Your support helps us equip pregnancy centers with equipment and training to provide free ultrasounds to mothers considering abortion. Every $60 that you get, you'll be able to donate to the option ultrasound program. Every $60 that you give will save a baby from abortion. And right now, special friends of the ministry who believe in life are offering to match your gift dollar for dollar. Your $60 gift could be doubled to $120, saving two babies. And when you give a gift of any amount today, we'll send you a CD of this message from Dr. Bill Lisle so that you can share it with a friend. Help us spread this message to others who need to hear it. Yeah, make a gift and save a life when you call 800, the letter A in the word family, or follow the link in the show notes to request that CD.

It has quite a bit of extra content. And remember, when you visit us online, you can see this presentation from Dr. Bill Lisle, complete with the photos and videos he shared with his audience. Well, next time, Pastor Bill Smith shares how to strengthen your relationship with your child one conversation at a time. How do we talk to our kids like God talks to us? Recognizing that everything he says is tinged with grace.

Doesn't mean that he's necessarily soft or easy or doesn't deal well with sin, but he deals well with it in a way that actually develops relationship rather than crushes it. On behalf of Jim Daly and the entire team, thanks for listening to this Focus on the Family podcast. Take a moment, please, leave a rating in your app and share about this episode with a friend. We'll thank you in advance. I'm John Fuller inviting you back next time as we once more help you and your family thrive in Christ. I'm here asking people how they could both give and get.

I don't know. Maybe love? Yeah, you could both give and get love. True, but it's also possible with a charitable gift annuity. You get a secure source of fixed income and a charitable tax deduction. Plus, giving a charitable gift annuity to Focus on the Family helps families thrive for generations to come. I love that. Find out more. Go to FocusPlannedGiving.com. That's FocusPlannedGiving.com.