Banned for Saving Lives
Dr Dermot Kearney | Executive Committee Member | Consultant Cardiologist
The Situation
Dr Dermot Kearney is a consultant cardiologist and hospital physician working in the NHS — a man who has dedicated his professional life to saving lives. He is also a committed Catholic Christian and former President of the Catholic Medical Association (UK), for whom medicine and faith have always been inseparable.
His case began not with a controversial act, but with a compassionate one.
After a number of pro-life organisations approached the Catholic Medical Association asking for medical help for women who had taken the first abortion pill and changed their minds, Dr Kearney discussed the situation carefully with other doctors — considering the safety, efficacy, legal and indemnity aspects, and practical considerations — before committing to establishing an abortion pill reversal service in the UK. As he later explained, this process took several years of deliberation and was very carefully considered.
The treatment itself is straightforward. It involves administering progesterone — the natural hormone that sustains pregnancy — to women who have taken mifepristone, the first abortion pill, but changed their minds before taking the second. Mifepristone works by blocking progesterone, effectively starving the developing baby. Progesterone administered in time can neutralise its effects.
Until Dr Kearney and his colleague began helping these women, the only option a regretful woman had was to travel to Harley Street and pay up to £1,000 to try to save her baby — a sum many simply could not afford. Dr Kearney made the treatment available at no cost, through a referral network, to women who had nowhere else to turn.
He never made any secret of his work. He wrote to the General Medical Council asking for guidance about women who change their mind during abortion. The GMC advised that women are entitled to know the available treatment options. He proceeded accordingly, with care, with transparency, and with the full weight of his medical expertise behind every decision.
Then the abortion industry came for him.
The Challenge
It did not take long for the abortion lobby to target Dr Kearney. He and his colleague found themselves summoned to a GMC hearing where they faced the very real risk of being struck off the medical register.
In May 2021, Dr Kearney and his colleague were prohibited by an Interim Orders Tribunal from offering abortion pill reversal, pending a General Medical Council investigation. Dr Kearney was called before a fitness to practise panel to answer ten allegations arising from a complaint by MSI Reproductive Choices — the major UK abortion provider formerly known as Marie Stopes International.
The move by the GMC to prevent Dr Kearney from providing this treatment is believed to be the first time a medical doctor has been prohibited from providing a treatment that saves lives.
The GMC’s legal representatives made no attempt to hide their hostility. They sought a complete suspension of 18 months against him. The tribunal eventually permitted him to continue practising medicine but under strict conditions — forbidden from prescribing, administering, or recommending abortion pill reversal.
The human cost of that ban was immediate and devastating. During those nine months, 160 women in the UK appealed to the abortion reversal treatment helpline and had to be told they could not be helped. That is 160 babies needlessly lost and 160 women left to pick up the pieces.
Meanwhile, the abortion industry continued its campaign. The medical director of MSI Reproductive Choices pursued an aggressive personal campaign against abortion pill reversal — including, it was alleged, contacting one of Dr Kearney’s own patients and attempting to persuade her to give false witness against the care she had received.
Through all of it, Dr Kearney’s own patients told a very different story. One woman said in her witness statement: “He was amazing. He was not at all judgmental. He was very professional. He was not trying to sell me something I did not want. He just cared. At a time in my life when I had no hope, he was like a little light. If it wasn’t for him I think I might even be dead now.”
Our Support
Supported by the Christian Legal Centre — the organisation from which NCTU was born — Dr Kearney challenged the ban all the way to the Royal Courts of Justice.
His legal team obtained nine witness statements from women Dr Kearney had helped — some who had successfully delivered their babies, others who had tragically not, but who were unanimous in their support for the care he had given them. These were real women with real stories, whose voices cut through the ideology and the institutional hostility to show what the work actually looked like on the ground.
Lawyers argued before the High Court that the interim order against Dr Kearney should never have been made — that the measures were disproportionate, that the evidence failed to demonstrate any real risk to the public, and that the GMC had been used as an instrument of ideological pressure rather than medical regulation.
Dr Kearney did not stand alone. And that matters — because in a case of this magnitude, against institutions of this power, no individual should have to.
The Outcome
The GMC’s case examiners dismissed every allegation against Dr Dermot Kearney and concluded that there was no case to answer. They found that the women he had supported had received high-level care and, following expert evidence, that abortion reversal treatment is safe.
The complaint — described by the GMC itself as based on “hearsay” evidence brought by MSI Reproductive Choices — collapsed entirely. The case was closed with no further action.
Dr Kearney responded: “I am relieved and delighted to have been exonerated. I have been the victim of a coordinated campaign by senior figures in the abortion industry who have been determined to prevent women in urgent need from accessing abortion reversal treatment. The whole investigation and the untruths reported in the media have taken a toll on me and my family. The truth about abortion reversal treatment must now be told — and medical professionals who are able and willing to support women with the treatment should be allowed to do so without fear.”
To date, 32 women who received abortion pill reversal treatment from Dr Kearney have given birth to healthy babies. Thirty-two lives that would not exist were it not for one doctor who refused to be silenced.
Why It Matters
Dermot’s case is unlike any other among our Executive Committee. It was not fought in an employment tribunal. It was fought at the Royal Courts of Justice. And what was at stake was not just one man’s career — but the right of women across the UK to know that a choice exists, even after the first abortion pill has been taken.
When asked about the eternal significance of what he had endured, Dr Kearney said: “In dealing with these trials that have lately come my way, I am reminded that on Judgement Day, it won’t be the GMC that I have to stand before and give account of my life.”
That is the conviction that drove him — through the ban, through the investigation, through the High Court challenge, and through every attempt to silence him. Not ideology. Not ambition. Faith, conscience, and a doctor’s duty to his patients.
Dermot’s story asks a question that every Christian professional in the UK must grapple with: when your convictions put you in the crosshairs of powerful institutions, what will you do? Will you stand? And if so, who will stand with you?
NCTU exists to make sure the answer to that last question is never “no one.”
“We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.” — 2 Corinthians 4:8–9
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