"Silent Scream" Producer Dead at 84.

‘I am one of those who helped usher in this barbaric age.’ After putting
thousands of unborn children to death, he became one of the great leaders of
the pro-life movement.

BY STEPHEN VINCENT

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. Baptized Catholic
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 New
York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He also received confirmation and first
Communion from the cardinal. 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 St. Paul, who was a great persecutor of the
Church, yet when he saw the light of Christ, he was perhaps the greatest
apostle for the Gospel. Dr. Nathanson was like that after his conversion. He
went all around the world talking about the babies and the evils of
abortion. Being his godmother was such an amazing thing, to see him come to
Christ.” 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. A Doctor’s Son Bernard Nathanson was born in New York City
July 31, 1926. His father was a highly accomplished
obstetrician/gynecologist who taught in various prestigious medical schools.
Nathanson grew up with his younger sister in a secular Jewish home. As he
explained in his autobiography, his father sent him to Hebrew school yet
would question and undermine the teachings of the rabbis. 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 McGill University
Medical College in Montreal, where he had his first experience with abortion
after he got his girlfriend pregnant. He used the money received in the mail
from his father to pay for her abortion, at a time when the procedure was
illegal. “It served as my introductory excursion into the satanic world of
abortion,” he later wrote. After graduating from medical school in 1949,
he did his residency in Chicago and New York, at one time working in the
same hospital as his father. In 1953 he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and
served for a few years as an obstetrician/gynecologist. After his military
stint, he settled in New York and began building a thriving ob-gyn practice.
While working with poor patients, he saw the scarring effects of illegal
abortions on the women. He wrote, “Illegal abortion was in 1967 the number
one killer of pregnant women.” In New York, he got another girlfriend
pregnant and decided to perform an abortion on her himself. About aborting
his own child, he wrote in The Hand of God: “I swear to you that I had no
feelings aside from the sense of accomplishment, the pride of expertise.”
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.”
Busiest Abortion Business 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 New York’s abortion laws. In looking for an easy target to
attack for media attention, Nathanson said, they chose the Catholic Church,
whose opposition to abortion they blamed for every botched illegal abortion
they brought before the media. Bolstered by a coalition of abortion doctors
and a burgeoning feminist movement, New York’s lawmakers passed a bill to
overturn the state’s century-old abortion restrictions, which was signed
into law by Republican Gov. Nelson Rockefeller on July 1, 1970. Soon
Nathanson was the director of the new Center for Reproductive and Sexual
Health (CRASH) in Manhattan, which he described as the “largest abortion
clinic in the Western world,” with referrals from all along the Eastern
seaboard and beyond. 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 Wallingford, Connecticut.


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