Study Finds Prayers Helped Women Get Pregnant

N E W   Y O R K, Oct. 4, 2001 -- This week, researchers at Columbia University and Cha Hospital of Korea have hesitantly stoked the fires of medicine, theology, and philosophy with an article reporting that women undergoing in vitro fertilization had higher rates of pregnancy when groups of strangers anonymously prayed for them.

Indeed, it would be a truly wonderful and life-altering phenomenon if scientists discovered that prayer alone could help us bear children or cure disease.

In fact, both self-prayer and the direct support of a religious community have been shown to improve health. Doctors and researchers speculate these religious factors influence mental and physical health by altering brain function, shifting hormone levels and boosting the immune system.

Most physicians however, remain skeptical of the curative powers of anonymous prayer.

The Study

Researchers at Columbia University conducted the study with 199 women at an in vitro fertilization clinic in Korea. Unknown to the patients and their doctors, groups of strangers from the US, Canada, and Australia were asked to pray for their success in getting pregnant.

Pictures of patients in the test group were sent to the people praying when the women began hormone treatment and prayer continued for the next three weeks. No one knew which group was which until the three weeks was up.

The patients in the study were all undergoing in vitro fertilization, an assisted reproduction technique in which a man's sperm, and a woman's egg are combined in a laboratory dish, where fertilization occurs. The resulting embryo is then transferred to the uterus to develop naturally. According to the latest statistics from the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, the success rate of in vitro fertilization averages 22.8 percent live births per egg retrieval.

To the surprise of the researchers, the women who were prayed for ended up with a significantly higher pregnancy rate than those who were not prayed for. "About 50 percent got pregnant in the prayer group and about 26 percent in the non-prayer group," the lead author of the report, Dr. Roger A. Lobo, Columbia's chairman of obstetrics and gynecology said on Good Morning America. The study appears in the current Journal of Reproductive Medicine.

Surprise and Skepticism

Lobo and his colleagues initially questioned whether to publish their findings, since the results seemed so unlikely. Yet the findings were so statistically overpowering, the research team decided to share them, said Lobo. He said the researchers tackled the study out of curiosity, and because it had not been done before.

And even though the study was carefully thought out, conducted, and analyzed, even Lobo remains skeptical of the results and agrees that more work in this area needs to be done. For example, additional factors such as the religiosity and psychological profiles of the study participants should next be explored.

Its important to point out that in every scientific study there is a statistical margin of error, usually quite small, that the results occurred purely by chance, rather than by cause. So research findings are always considered preliminary until the same results are repeatedly found by different researchers with different groups of subjects.

In addition, becoming pregnant involves numerous biological, psychological, and perhaps even spiritual factors that we don't fully understand. And, despite our best abilities, we can never fully control all the variables that might influence the outcome of a study.

And finally, the potential psychological ramifications are worrisome. From the results of this study, some people may feel that if they cannot get pregnant or are not healed of their illness that it is because they did not have enough faith, or didn't get enough people to pray for them.

This study is one of many that have been done on religion and medicine, and while the results are statistically significant, the benefits of prayer have by no means been conclusively proven.

— Dr. Timothy Johnson is ABCNEWS' medical editor and a medical doctor who also serves as assisting minister of the Community Covenant Church in West Peabody, Mass.