See below for footage of Dr. Anderson on CBN News.

Dr. Marie Anderson refers to the time before she joined Tepeyac Family Center in Fairfax as “my previous life.”

The medical center director’s path to the pro-life practice was cobbled together with stones of emotion ranging from restlessness and anxiety to torment and grief. As a child, she witnessed a mother’s grief; as a mother, she suffered a child’s death. While studying to be a doctor, she found herself at uncomfortable odds with a faith she often forgot to practice. When she began to feel a tug “like a magnet’s pull” back toward the Church, she was faced with reconciling her secular medical practices with newly developed spiritual values.

The rediscovery of Catholicism, a friendship with Dr. John Bruchalski and her arrival at Tepeyac brought Anderson a peace that she had long sought, but, until then, never found.

The doctor’s start

Anderson, 59, was born in Indiana on March 4, 1950. She moved with her family to Marshall, Va., in the fifth grade. Growing up during the 1960s, her life was shaped by school integration, Kennedy’s assassination and the Vietnam War.

An adult journey filled with baby steps, Anderson first was going to be a doctor, but instead ended up a dental hygienist. She married her husband, Dave, and began a family. Though they were married in the Church, Anderson said it wasn’t high on their list of priorities.

“I went to church kind of whenever I felt like it,” she said. “It wasn’t the center of my life. It was a very secret thing for me, very private.”

Unfulfilled in her profession, Anderson went back to medical school at Georgetown University in Washington. Surrounded by Catholics, she began to feel uneasy about some of the medical conclusions she had drawn, especially concerning women’s health.

“This started awakening all kinds of spiritual movements in me,” she said.

Interwoven into the story of her career is the one of her family. Anderson was the oldest of eight children, only four of whom lived. Her mother lost two children in early miscarriages and another two who died in infancy. Anderson witnessed bleeding, hemorrhaging and her mother being taken away in an ambulance.

“That left a mark on me,” Anderson said. “I wanted to help women like my mother, and I thought I could do it. It wasn’t until I saw the big picture of faith that I realized God does it. I do the procedures, but God heals.”

While at Georgetown, Anderson said she still hadn’t formed her values and morals. She was uncertain about birth control, still picking and choosing what to believe about the Catholic faith. After her third child, Karl, was born, she knew all she wanted was to be an obstetrician-gynecologist (OB-GYN). With that decision, she came face-to-face with some of her biggest struggles.

“These are the years that showed me I could no longer be a fence-sitter,” she said. “I was dealing with issues that have to have a positive or negative response. There is no ‘I want to defer this decision.’”

In her residency, she said, she tied tubes and implanted IUDS, another form of birth control. She considered herself pro-choice, but didn’t want to perform abortions.

She began to take steps. She went to confession. She sought out a spiritual director.

“I began actively searching for my faith,” she said. “I wanted to set up the values, the morals, the life guides that I would make the statement of my life.”

After much delay, she finally made an appointment with Bruchalski, Tepeyac’s founder, an experience that proved to be immediately healing. At that moment, Anderson knew what she wanted: the peace this pro-life doctor had.

A shift in careers In the mid-1990s, two things happened. First, Anderson read a Catholic Herald article about Tepeyac, which focused on practicing medicine under the guidelines of the Church; and second, after telling her boss she wouldn’t perform an abortion on her 15-year-old daughter should she get pregnant, Anderson lost her private practice job.

She found another position and began cutting down on birth control procedures. She continued meeting with Bruchalski, and was blown away by the positive, life-giving manner in which he practiced medicine.

“He saw the poor, he saw the crisis pregnancy center kids,” she said. “He totally believed in Natural Family Planning and used it to either achieve or avoid pregnancy.”

Basically, she said, he incorporated the beatitudes into his OB-GYN work — a new and intriguing idea for Anderson.

“To see the poor, that was something that was never even on the radar screen because that didn’t help the bottom line of the practice,” she said. “In my other practices, it was very much a business. This is a way of life.”

Anderson joined Tepeyac on Sept. 29, 1997, literally after having been “prayed into the practice,” she said, by staff and patients. No longer was she defined by what she didn’t do. Now it was what she did do that mattered. She realized that her faith was the center of her life, not something superfluous to it. Each patient she sees makes her grow spiritually.

“As I began to step out of my shoes into other people’s, I began to see that we are put on this earth to return to God,” she said. “The choices we make either help or hinder that process.”

A family tragedy

In 2004, Anderson lost her oldest child, Kristen, in a car accident. Instead of turning away from her faith, she leaned on it harder than ever. Even so, she was terrified to continue delivering babies.

“I was afraid every baby I delivered would look just like her and it would bring back her birth and her death,” Anderson said. Sure enough, “the first baby I delivered did look just like her, but it brought a joy, a joy to know that the world goes on — that there’s hope.”

Her mission now is to bring that hope to others. “I honor Kristen’s life every time I bring a new child into this world,” she said.

She founded the Kristen Anderson Perinatal Hospice program to give support to pregnant women whose babies had been diagnosed with genetic imperfections.

Even after losing Kristen, Anderson, through her medical practice, is filled with a joy and a peace she logically can’t justify.

“They say the loss of a child is the hurt that never goes away,” she said. “But it can heal and that healing can bring joy.”

Though she can’t explain the joy, it’s there in the work she does with the ones who need it most: work that follows her head, work that follows her heart and work that follows her Church.

“I’m at peace,” Anderson said. “And I found it here at Tepeyac.”