Noted Abortionist Finds God and Faith
Dr. Bernard Nathanson. <The Hand of God: A Journey from Death to
Life by the Abortion Doctor Who Changed His Mind.> Regnery
Publishing: Washington, 1996.
Dr. Bernard Nathanson has written an important book. In time it
will rank with Merton's <Seven Storey Mountain> and Malcolm
Muggeridge's <Chronicles of Wasted Time>, and even the epochal
<Gulag Archipelago> of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, as the books which
our descendants, both familial and spiritual, will examine closely
in the 21st and 22nd centuries in order to understand both man's
inhumanity to humanity and to his personal self and the
possibility of redemption.
Only in this context will the reader understand the power and
grace of the message of the Church and most particularly the Roman
Pontiff John Paul II, who in his Encyclical <Evangelium vitae> so
clearly enunciated the sacredness of human life from natural
conception to natural death and, in between, the centrality of the
"dignity of the human person" in the face of a century of mass
slaughter and degradation.
The book has historical significance but it also possesses
importance in the present moment. As I write this review the U.S.
Congress is attempting to overturn the presidentially vetoed
Partial-Birth Abortion Act, and a presidential race is drawing to
a close between two candidates who clearly have radically
different views on the sacredness of human life. Bernard
Nathanson's intellectual and moral honesty has enabled many other
abortion providers or accomplices, including recently some
legislators to acknowledge their mistakes and join the fight for
human life at its most defenceless. Quite simply abortion and its
auxiliary issues ranging from the euthanasia antics of "Dr.
Death", Jack Kevorkian, to the frozen embryos of Great Britain are
the issues that simply will not go away as they deal with the
meaning of human life itself. Nowhere more clearly than in the
United States in this historical moment can one see the divisions
lining up be hind the forces of the "culture of death" and
"civilization of love". Dr. Bernard Nathanson's conversions both
to the cause of life and to Christianity are in deed highly
significant as witness both to the power of scientific evidence
and of prayer. It also manifests so clearly the inexorable
connection between God and the natural law that he has in scribed
in human nature. If you ac knowledge and follow the natural law,
you may very well find God and the Church.
A powerful witness to possibilities of grace
The basic facts about Dr. Nathanson are well known to many
readers. He was co-founder in 1969 of the National Association for
the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL, later renamed the National
Abortion Rights Action League), and former director of New York
City's Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health, then the largest
abortion clinic in the world. In the late 1970's he turned against
abortion to become a prominent pro-life advocate, authoring
<Aborting America> and producing the seminal pro-life video, <The
Silent Scream>. The video was truly revolutionary in its use of
the most up-to-date medical technology to show definitely the
horrors of abortion as it actually takes place in the womb of the
mother. The video, along with its successor <The Eclipse of
Reason>, was widely shown not only on television globally, but in
many cases directly to legislators in many countries.
During the late 1970's Dr. Nathanson became an icon to the
cultural anti-life forces in America, the subject of ridicule and
satire in comic strips and news commentary, and the butt of jokes
of television comedians for his change of heart and mind regarding
the objective reality of abortion, the taking of innocent human
life. Since then along with a distinguished obstetric medical
practice and university teaching he has given hundreds of lectures
throughout the world in defence of the unborn. Now upon the verge
of retirement he has written his autobiography, which contains
searing personal revelations about how a man could possibly become
an abortionist, yet also a powerful witness to the possibilities
of divine grace as he draws near to the final step of Baptism and
incorporation into Christ's Church.
A warning to the reader: this is not an easy or pleasant book to
read because it tells the truth about evil acts that are truly
repugnant. What is remarkable and praiseworthy is that the doctor
does not make excuses for his behaviour. The reader certainly has
many reasons at least to understand without condoning his
behaviour after reading about his childhood and adolescence in a
familial setting that can truly be described as loveless.
Nathanson recounts in painful detail his bringing up in New York
by a family that appears to have been seriously dysfunctional for
at least a couple of generations without the slightest semblance
of religious faith or familial loyalty or affection.
The first chapter is entitled "The Monster", referring to his
father, and spells out very clearly the young Nathanson's
relationships with his Jewish Canadian physician father and his
family. "We would take long walks together, he and I, and he would
fill my ears with poisonous remarks and revanchist resolutions
concerning my mother and her family and ... I remained his weapon,
his dummy, until I was almost seventeen years old, when l-as-he
rebelled and told him I would no longer function as his robotic
surrogate assassin". About his sister, "her mental health
destroyed, her physical health intact but�to her befuddled mind
� suspect, her children rebellious, fallen in with bad company
and truant, my sister killed herself one sunny August morning with
an overdose of a powerful sedative". Regarding himself, "And l? I
have three failed marriages and have fathered a son who is sullen,
suspicious but brilliant in computer science".
The secret of Christ's peace
Religion had no real role in his upbringing. His family was non-
observant, although they did celebrate the Jewish holidays,
perhaps as many putative Christians still observe in a certain
sense Easter and Christmas, without these Christian solemnities
having any real impact on their thought or behaviour. Quite
striking is his description of his childhood concept of God. "My
childhood image of God was, as I reflect on it six decades later,
the brooding, majestic, full-bearded figure of Michelangelo's
Moses. He sits slumped on what appears to be his throne, pondering
my fate and at the brink of disgorging his inevitably damning
judgment. This was my Jewish God: massive, leonine, and
forbidding". This description fits in very well with the noted
psychologist Paul Vitz's view that almost all serious atheists are
the victims of abusive or absent fathers. One can see that
Nathanson in describing his vision of God could well be describing
his abusive father. At a later period in his life, during a stint
in the Air Force, to while away the idle hours, he takes a Bible
study and "discovered that the New Testament God was a loving,
forgiving, incomparably cosseting figure in whom I would seek, and
ultimately find, the forgiveness that I have pursued so
hopelessly, for so long", thus presaging his eventual conversion
to the Christian faith.
During his medical studies at McGill University in Canada he had
as a professor the famous Jewish psychiatrist, emigre from Nazi
Germany, Karl Stern. This relationship would have positive
consequences decades later as Nathanson began to examine more
closely the arguments for Christianity. He says about him: "Stern
was the dominant figure in the department: a great teacher; a
riveting, even eloquent lecturer in a language not his own and a
brilliant contrarian spewing out original and daring ideas as
reliably as Old Faithful. I conceived an epic case of hero-worship
of Stern read my psychiatry with the diligence of a biblical
scholar, and in turn was awarded -the prize in psychiatry at the
end of my fourth year.... There was something indefinably serene
and certain about him. I did not know then that in 1943, after
years of contemplating, reading and analyzing, he had converted to
Roman Catholicism". Later on Nathanson read his famous
autobiography <The Pillar of Fire>. It is then he realized that
Stern "possessed a secret I had been searching for all my life,
the secret of the peace of Christ".
Later chapters go on to relate a compulsive promiscuity, which
results in his first encounter with an abortion, one performed on
his first girlfriend and paid for by his father, the story of his
first two marriages, and in what is perhaps the most shocking and
chilling incident, an abortion performed by himself on another of
the women with whom he had had affairs. "In the midsixties I
impregnated a woman who loved me very much. She begged me to keep
the pregnancy, to have our child. I already had two ruined
marriages, both destroyed largely by own selfish narcissism and
inability to love. (I believe it was Father Zossima in <The
Brothers Karamazov> who defined hell as the suffering of one
unable to love and if this is true, I have served my sentence and
then some.... I saw no practical way out of the situation, told
her that I would not marry her and that I could not at that time
afford to support a child (an egregious example of the coercion
exercised by males in the abortion tragedy), and I not only
demanded that she terminate the pregnancy as a condition of
maintaining our relationship, but also cooly informed her that
since I was one of the most skilled practitioners of the art, I
myself would do the abortion. And I did". He goes on to explain
the procedure and then says, in words that remind one of the
famous Goya painting of Saturn devouring his children: "You pursue
me: you ask if perhaps for a fleeting moment or so I experienced a
flicker of regret, a microgram of remorse? No and no. And that,
dear reader, is the mentality of the abortionist; another job well
done, another demonstration of the moral neutrality of advanced
technology in the hands of the amoral".
Witness of pro-lifers was decisive
In the subsequent chapters he recounts much of what has already
been told in his earlier book Aborting America about his growing
involvement in the fight for the liberalization of abortion laws
in the -United States, which of course culminated in the notorious
decision in 1973 of Roe vs. Wade by the Supreme Court of the
United States effectively providing for abortion on demand in the
U.S. Over time Dr. Nathanson saw clearly the scientific evidence,
due in great part to the new technology. It enabled him to see the
child in the womb. What he had been aborting by the thousands (he
estimates that he was involved directly or indirectly in over
75,000 abortions) was in fact a human being from the moment of
conception. He stopped performing abortions and became the best
known advocate and convert to the pro-life cause in the U.S.
In one of the final chapters of the book, entitled "To the
Thanatoriums" he prophesies about what Pope Paul VI presaged so
clearly in his Encyclical <Humanae vitae>, that once the respect
for human life at its inception is lost the way will lead
inevitably to euthanasia. "Drawing largely from my experience with
a similar brand of pagan excess I predict that entrepreneurs will
set up multiple small, discreet infirmaries for those who wish,
have been talked into, coerced into, or medically deceived into
death.... But that will only be the first phase. As the thanatoria
flourish and expand into chains and franchised operations, the
accountants will eventually assume command, slashing expenses and
overheads as competition grows. The final streamlined, efficient,
and economically flawless version of the thanatorium will resemble
nothing so much as the assembly line factories that abortion
clinics have become and �farther on down the slope� the ovens of
Auschwitz" .
However, he ends the book on a note of hope in Christ's mercy,
forgiveness, and offer of salvation. As is often the case in a
story of conversion, it is the prayers and personal example of so
many of his pro-life friends and coworkers that over time melt
down the resistance of a hardened atheistic sinner so that he can
see that there might be room in God's heart even for the likes of
him. Speaking of the witness of pro-lifers at a demonstration at
an abortion clinic: "They prayed, they supported, and encouraged
each other, they sang hymns of joy, and they constantly reminded
each other of the absolute prohibition against violence. They
prayed for the unborn babies, for the confused and pregnant women,
and for the doctors and nurses in the clinic. They even prayed for
the police and media who were covering the event. And I wondered:
how can these people give of themselves for a constituency that is
(and always will be) mute, invisible, and unable to thank them?".
With - respect to the confrontation between idealism and hardened
cynicism, the description of such demonstrations could remind us
of early accounts of the Christian martyrs in the Colosseum of
Rome facing the lions.
Witnessing these pro-life demonstrators who were willing to go to
jail and suffer bankruptcy for their belief made such a powerful
impression on Nathanson that "for the first time in my entire
adult life, I began seriously to entertain the notion of God, a
God who problematically had led me through the proverbial circles
of hell, only to show me the way to redemption and mercy through
His Grace. The thought violated every eighteenth century certainty
that I had cherished; it instantly converted my past into a vile
bog of sin and evil; it indicated me and convicted me of high
crimes against those who loved me, and against those whom I did
not even know, and simultaneously � miraculously�it held out a
shimmering sliver of hope to me, in the growing belief that
Someone had died for my sins and my evil two millennia ago".
Along with the powerful witness to his heart of these sacrificial
lovers, the prolifers willing to go to prison if necessary to stop
the killing, Nathanson was also moved by the appeal to his
intellect, through reading. "In my case, I was led to a searching
review of the literature of conversion, including Karl Stern's
<Pillar of Fire.> I also read Malcolm Muggeridge, Walker Percy,
Graham Greene C.S. Lewis, Cardinal Newman and others. It was
entirely in character for me that I would conduct a diligent
review of literature before embarking on a mission as daunting and
threatening as this searching for God".
Thus we leave Dr. Nathanson, a true 20th-century man, on the verge
of his reception into the Catholic Church, ready to "cross the
threshold of hope", leaving "the culture of death" behind forever.
Fr C.J. McCloskey III
Taken from the November 20, 1996 issue of "L'Osservatore Romano".
Editorial and Management Offices, Via del pellegrino, 00120,
Vatican City, Europe, Telephone 39/6/698.99.390.
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