Kevin Kelly/Key photo Dr. Leslie Chorun says it isn't easy practicing medicine according to Catholic social teaching. But it is the only way she will do it.

She read Pope Paul VI's "Humanae Vitae."

"I had been away from the church for many years. I wasn't going to Mass regularly or living a sacramental life," said Chorun, a native of New Jersey who came to Kansas City for her residency at Kansas University Medical Center.

She began returning to the church at St. Agnes Parish in Roeland Park, Kan., not far from the medical center. At a May crowning service, she met a group for young adult professionals who invited her to join their prayer group. One of them gave her a copy of Pope Paul's controversial 1968 encyclical which affirmed the church's ban on artificial birth control.

"It was an attorney friend of mine who was talking about how to live our faith through our profession," she said. "He handed me 'Humanae Vitae,' and that's how I got into this practice."

Chorun is one of six health care professionals who have formed FertilityCare Center of Kansas City, a medical practice focusing on the Creighton Model of natural family planning. Using natural signs to predict fertility cycles, the system stresses that women do not have to resort to drugs to regulate fertility cycles, either to avoid or to enhance pregnancy.

Most important to Chorun, modern natural family planning also teaches that fertility is not a disease.

"In medicine, the first general principle is to understand what is normal. If there is some sort of disease or illness, you have to identify and diagnose the problem," she said. "Then you can correct the abnormality and bring the organism back to health."

For women, the ability to bear children is normal, Chorun said.

"But what is happening is that fertility is treated as a disease - that God-given gift and state of health is treated like an illness to be cured. It is suppressed or destroyed either medically or surgically," she said.

"This puts women in a pharmaceutically controlled state of fertility suppression," Chorun said.

Chorun admitted that she prescribed contraceptives and even performed tubal ligations when she started her residency. But after reading the encyclical, she could do that no longer.

"When I read 'Humanae Vitae' I didn't instantly understand the whole thing," she said. "But the Holy Spirit eventually made it clear to me that if I wanted to live my Catholic faith, I was called to be obedient to the church's teachings, even if I didn't understand them yet."

The more she prayed, the more she understood, Chorun said. "I was being called to change the way I was practicing medicine."

And that caused her a variety of problems, even to the point of threatening her career, she said.

"I was told at one point that by not referring women for abortions or contraception, that was below the 'standard of care,'" for physicians, Chorun said. "In the entire environment I was in, I can't recall anybody of the same mind as I was in as far as being fully faithful to church teaching."

Chorun said writing prescriptions is easy.

"It's very easy and very quick," she said. "The doctor feels like he has done something and the patient feels like she is getting something. But is that medicine? That's a whole other question."

The pressure on Chorun was increasing from the supervisors of her residency program. At one point, she consulted a priest for spiritual guidance. "He told me, no, I couldn't practice like that (the way she was being trained). The goal was to live our Catholic faith, and that wasn't it."

During this period, Chorun discovered the Pope Paul VI Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction in Omaha, founded by Dr. Tom Hilgers to teach natural family planning practices to other health care professionals as a safe, effective alternative to artificial birth control.

"I had four years of medical school, and four and a half years of residency, and in all of that education, there was no kind of training whatsoever in modern, natural methods of regulating fertility," Chorun said.

Eventually, however, Chorun was forced to resign from the residency program months before completion. Though she was able to obtain licenses to practice in both Kansas and Missouri, her insistence on building her practice based solely on natural methods continued to cause her problems.

When she applied for her Missouri license, a friend attempted to intervene with one of her residency supervisors to help Chorun get a good reference.

The supervisor told her friend, "She's too Catholic," Chorun said.

Though she will never be board-certified in family practice, Chorun said she has reaped other professional rewards.

She is the immediate past president of the American Academy of FertilityCare Professionals, a group of 350 doctors, nurses and other health care professionals dedicated to natural methods of family planning and women's health care.

But accolades and wealth aren't her goals, Chorun said.

"I believe that God's laws are made clear to us through the church's teachings," she said. "If you believe that God's laws are for our own good and happiness, then you can trust that if you follow God's laws, you will be blessed.

"This is the way to happiness," Chorun said.

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