Bernard Nathanson
BERNARD Nathanson (1926-2011) was one of the most influential people in the movement to legalize abortion in the 1960s and 70s. Not only did he help found the National Abortion Rights League in 1969, but for two years he was the director of the largest abortion clinic in the world. By his count, he was personally involved in about 75,000 abortions in his work at the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health in Manhattan. Calling an abortion clinic a center of “reproductive health” was one of the brilliant propaganda moves of that era which continues to this day.
By a miracle of God’s grace, Nathanson had a profound change of heart. He later campaigned against abortion and was immediately shunned by the media outlets which had previously so warmed to him.
Today, on the 47th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, we remember those who like Nathanson have given themselves to the fight against abortion. “Since 1973, there have been over 61,679,000 abortions performed in the United States alone. Since 1980, the worldwide total number of abortions exceeds 1,562,298,000.” [Source]
In the film “The Silent Scream,” Nathanson argued that the science of fetal development and ultrasound imaging had refuted once and for all the idea that the fetus was not a living human being, settling a question that had preoccupied philosophers for many centuries. “Beyond question, the unborn child is simply another child, another human being, indistinguishable in many ways from us. Now we have the technology to see abortion from the victim’s vantage point.”
The abortion movement had lied and conspired against women, he said. It had, by clever sensationalism, deceived them as to the true nature of the unborn child, and he challenged Planned Parenthood and other abortion merchants to show his film to women contemplating abortion. “Women in increasing numbers — hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands — have had their wombs perforated, infected, destroyed. Women have been castrated, sterilized, all because of an operation of which they have had no true knowledge.”
His change was not about science alone. Nathanson, who was Jewish, eventually converted to Catholicism. The Church, he believed, was the leading institution defending the unborn and it was the only institution where he could find God’s mercy for his own role in the abortion movement.
Robert P. George recounted Nathanson’s life in 2011 shortly after his death:
Dr. Nathanson, the son of a distinguished medical practitioner and professor who specialized in obstetrics and gynecology, had his first involvement with abortion as a medical student at McGill University in Montreal. Having impregnated a girlfriend, he arranged and paid for her illegal abortion. Many years later, he would mark this episode as his “introductory excursion into the satanic world of abortion.”
In the meantime, however, Nathanson would become a nearly monomaniacal crusader for abortion and campaigner for its legalization. And he would himself become an abortionist. Read More »