|
|
|
"Children are a gift from God, a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb is His reward..." |
|
|
|
“Precious
in the sight of the Lord Dr. Nathanson renounced the deceitful figures he gave decades ago misrepresenting back-alley abortion deaths. To this day, we have seen more women die by legalized abortion than by so-called back-alley abortions. National
Catholic Register- Daily News
NEW YORK — Dr. Bernard N. Nathanson, an obstetrician who
oversaw the performance of about 75,000 abortions before becoming
a leading pro-life advocate and a convert to the Catholic faith,
died at his home in New York Feb. 21 after a prolonged battle with
cancer. He was 84.
After performing his last abortion in 1979 and declaring
himself to be pro-life, Nathanson produced the 1985 film The
Silent Scream, which shows sonogram images of a child in the
womb shrinking from an abortionist’s instruments, and the
documentary film Eclipse of Reason, which displays and
explains various abortion procedures in graphic detail. Both films
had a significant impact on the abortion debate, solidified his
credentials among pro-life advocates and earned him the scorn of
his former pro-abortion friends and colleagues.
He also published a number of influential books, including Aborting
America, written in 1979 with Richard Ostling, then a religion
reporter for Time magazine, in which he exposed the
deceptive and dishonest beginnings of the pro-abortion movement
and undermined the argument that abortion is safe for women.
He often admitted that he and other abortion advocates in
the 1960s lied about the number of women who died from illegal
abortions at that time, inflating the figure from a few hundred to
10,000 to gain sympathy for their cause.
In his 1996 autobiography The Hand of God, he told
the story of his journey from pro-abortion to pro-life, saying
that viewing images from the new ultrasound technology in the
1970s convinced him of the humanity of the unborn baby. Outlining
the enormous challenge of restoring a pro-life ethic, he wrote,
“Abortion is now a monster so unimaginably gargantuan that even
to think of stuffing it back into its cage … is ludicrous beyond
words. Yet that is our charge — a herculean endeavor.”
He noted, regretfully, “I am one of those who helped
usher in this barbaric age.” His
pro-life witness could not easily be dismissed as one-sided
propaganda since Nathanson had enjoyed such a high standing among
abortion supporters as a co-founder of the National Association
for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (now called NARAL ProChoice
America), and as operator of what he called the nation’s busiest
abortion business. The facility was opened in New York City after
the state’s abortion laws were loosened in 1970 and abortion
promoters realized that the high number of women seeking abortion
could not all be admitted to a hospital for the procedure. A
freestanding ambulatory clinic, in which abortion and recovery
took about three hours, was an innovation devised by Nathanson and
his colleagues.
Overall, Nathanson estimated, he presided over 60,000
abortions as director of the facility, instructed fellow
practitioners in the performance of 15,000 other abortions, and
personally performed about 5,000 abortions, including one on his
own child conceived with a girlfriend in the 1960s.
For more than a decade after he became pro-life, Nathanson
described himself as a Jewish atheist, but in December of 1996 he
was baptized a Catholic by Cardinal John O’Connor in a private
Mass with a group of friends in About
his baptism, he said, “I was in a real whirlpool of emotion, and
then there was this healing, cooling water on me, and soft voices,
and an inexpressible sense of peace. I had found a safe place.”
Among those concelebrating the Mass was Father C. John
McCloskey, an Opus Dei priest who had instructed Nathanson in the
faith over a number of years. “He
was a pro-life prophet,” Father McCloskey said in a recent
Register interview. “He saw the whole culture of death coming,
and knew that abortion was just the tip of the iceberg.”
Nathanson visited Father McCloskey periodically over the
course of a decade, the priest said, and one day in 1994 announced
that he wanted to become a Catholic. After his baptism, Father
McCloskey said, “He practiced the faith, he frequented the
sacraments, and spoke about his Catholicism unabashedly.”
Nathanson later said that he was drawn closer to God while
viewing a massive Operation Rescue event, when hundreds sat down
in front of a New York Planned Parenthood building, blocking
traffic. The sight of so many pro-lifers selflessly sacrificing
their selves and risking arrest made him realize that they must be
answering a higher call, he explained.
In an epilogue to the second edition of The Hand of God,
Father McCloskey called the book “one of the more important
autobiographies of the twentieth century,” which documents
“man’s inhumanity both to humanity and to his personal self,
and the possibility of redemption.”
Another strong factor in his conversion was the book Pillar
of Fire, by noted psychiatrist Dr. Karl Stern, who tells of
his own journey from Judaism to the Catholic Church. Nathanson
studied briefly under Stern in medical school, though at that time
he did not know about Stern’s conversion. It was only years
later, when Nathanson read Pillar of Fire that he learned
off his former professor’s religious views.
Nathanson’s godmother for baptism was Joan Andrews Bell,
who had served more than a year in jail for blocking the entrances
to abortion businesses. She
said she spoke to Nathanson by phone in February 2011, when he
only had the strength to speak a few sentences. “He said he was
praying for us, and I told him we love him and pray for him,
too,” she said.
“He will be remembered as a very strong advocate for the
babies,” she continued. “One factor stood out, knowing him
over the years, and that was that he had a deep pain for what he
had done in terms of abortion. I remember there were periods he
was fasting; he underwent huge amounts of fasting to make up for
it.”
She said that he had “a deep and tender heart,” and
that once he saw the truth about abortion, he was determined to
stop it. “He was like
Nathanson was married and divorced three times before being
married in the Church by Father McCloskey soon after becoming a
Catholic. His wife, Christine, survives him, as does his grown
son, Joseph, by an earlier union.
Bernard Nathanson was born in
He described his father as an excellent and ethical
physician who was less than exemplary in his personal life. He was
dominating and overbearing, and cheated on his wife. Nathanson
wrote that his sister “lost her personality” under their
father’s influence and committed suicide at age 49, an event
that grieved his father so greatly that he never mentioned her in
conversation afterward.
Nathanson followed in his father’s footsteps, attending
After graduating from medical school in 1949, he did his
residency in
After his military stint, he settled in
In
He added, describing the abortionist’s mindset: “icy;
conscienceless; remorselessly perverting his medical skills;
defiling his ethical charge; and helping, nay seducing, with his
clinical calm, his oh-so-comforting professionalism, women into
the act that comes closest to self-slaughter.”
While not giving up his ob-gyn practice, Nathanson became
heavily involved in abortion in 1968 after meeting Larry Lader, a
politically connected public relations master who was obsessed
with overturning
Bolstered by a coalition of abortion doctors and a
burgeoning feminist movement,
Soon Nathanson was the director of the new Center for
Reproductive and Sexual Health (CRASH) in
Looking back on those years, he wrote, “I had a young son
and a wife, but I was hardly ever at home. I bitterly regret those
years, if for no other reason than that I failed to see my son
grow up.”
As he became more publicly associated with abortion, he was
treated as a “pariah” in legitimate medical circles and
received fewer obstetrical referrals. For these reasons, he
decided to leave the abortion facility at the end of 1972 and took
the position as chief of obstetrics at St. Luke’s Hospital,
where he kept doing abortions for what he considered “medically
justified reasons.”
Yet the advent of ultrasound technology eventually
convinced him that a true human being is killed in abortion, and
he began to develop what he called the “vector theory of
life.” By this he meant that from the time of conception, the
unborn child has a self-directed force of life that, if not
interrupted, will lead to the birth of a human baby. He knew this
was not “potential life,” as the Supreme Court ruled in Roe
v. Wade.
Writing in The Hand of God, Nathanson described a
turning point in his thinking: “I believe the fertilized ovum
(zygote) to be a new individual launched along an unimaginably
busy vector of life that terminates when the vector finally moves
its 180 degrees to the negative pole.”
The trajectory of this insight would lead him to his own
180-degree turn in thinking and eventually to work against legal
abortion and the industry that promoted it. Funeral arrangements are pending.
Register correspondent Stephen Vincent writes from |
|
|
To support and encourage Daniel and Angela please contact them - |
|