Bernard Nathanson:BERNARD NATHANSON, who has died aged 84, was an American obstetrician- gynaecologist who performed or oversaw some 60,000 abortions before doubting the morality of the procedure and becoming one of the most effective campaigners for the anti-abortion movement.
He helped found the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, today known as NARAL Pro-Choice America, and once led the busiest abortion clinics in the US. He trained thousands of doctors to perform abortions and estimated that he personally ended 5,000 pregnancies. One of his patients in the 1960s, he later wrote, was his pregnant girlfriend.
But new technology, including ultrasound imagery and recordings of fetal brain and heart function, caused him to quit providing abortion services. “For the first time, we could really see the human fetus . . . bond with it and love it,” he wrote in his 1996 autobiography, The Hand of God. “I began to do that.”
He catapulted himself into the centre of the abortion debate of the mid-1980s with a 28-minute film entitled The Silent Scream. The film uses ultrasound photography to show the real-time abortion of a 12-week-old fetus – grainy images that, according to Nathanson’s narration, show a violent and frightening process.
“Once again, we see the child’s mouth wide open in a silent scream,” he says as the doctor inserts a suction tube. “For the first time, we are going to watch a child being . . . destroyed by the unfeeling steel instruments of the abortionist.”
The film, bolstered by Dr Nathanson’s back story and high-profile about-face, became a sensation. It was widely distributed by anti-abortion groups and screened at the White House by then president Ronald Reagan, who urged members of Congress to see it and “move quickly to end the tragedy of abortion”.
Abortion-rights advocates criticised the film as inaccurate and emotionally manipulative but recognised its influence. Nathanson produced a second film, Eclipse of Reason, that explicitly portrayed late-term abortions.
In addition to his memoir, he wrote two other books, Aborting America (1979), with Richard Ostling, and Abortion Papers: Inside the Abortion Mentality (1983).
Bernard Nathanson was born to Jewish parents in New York in 1926. He graduated from McGill University medical school in Montreal and later served as a doctor with the US air force.
His “introductory excursion into the satanic world of abortion”, he later wrote, came in the 1940s, when he gave his pregnant girlfriend money for an illegal procedure. Two decades later, he performed an abortion on a different girlfriend. “I swear to you that I had no feelings aside from the sense of accomplishment, the pride of expertise,” he wrote.
He completed his residency at Woman’s Hospital in New York, where his father had a long career as a teaching doctor. He later joined his father’s private practice.
During the 1960s, before on-demand abortion became legal in New York, Nathanson provided abortions under regulatory loopholes that allowed for the procedure in the case of a woman’s psychiatric or therapeutic need. Having dealt first-hand with ill and injured victims of back-street abortions, in 1969 he helped found the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws.
In the early 1970s, he led Manhattan’s Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health, at the time the country’s largest provider of abortions. He left the clinic in 1972 and publicly announced his change of heart about abortion two years later, when he published an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine. But as obstetrical chief at New York’s St Luke’s Hospital from 1972 to 1978, he continued to oversee and perform abortions he deemed medically necessary.
His anti-abortion beliefs gradually hardened. By the late 1970s, he refused to perform the procedures and became an outspoken supporter of anti-abortion laws. In 1996, he converted to Catholicism having long described himself as a “Jewish atheist”.
He was baptised by Cardinal John O’Connor in a private Mass with a group of friends in St Patrick’s Cathedral, New York. He also received Confirmation and first Communion from the cardinal. When asked why he converted, Nathanson said simply that “no religion matches the special role for forgiveness that is afforded by the Catholic Church”.
In his writings and speeches about abortion, he often referred to the guilt he felt about the work he had done before his convictions changed. “I know every facet of abortion,” he wrote. “I am one of those who helped usher in this barbaric age.”
Bernard Nathanson: born July 31st, 1926; died February 21st, 2011