Excerpt from the lecture given by Bernard Nathanson in Canberra (Australia) in February 1981, sponsored by the Association for the Right to Life.
After being one of the main promoters of abortion legislation in the United States —to the point of being known in New York as “the king of abortion”— Dr. Bernard Nathanson underwent a radical change. Learning of the medical advances that demonstrate the existence of a human life in the fetus opened his eyes.
A man who has personally performed nearly five thousand abortions now declares: “Dramatically, I must acknowledge that the fetus is not a piece of flesh: it is a patient”.
I. A Pregnant Friend
My interest in abortion began as a result of my time at medical school and of the almost unavoidable experience of having a friend who became pregnant. In those days it was almost impossible to obtain an abortion; we finally managed it, but the person who performed it was a charlatan who nearly killed her. There followed some years of practice in obstetrics and gynecology —eight years, to be exact. It was then that a great sensitivity awoke in me toward the plight of those women who exposed themselves to serious injury, and even death, in clandestinely performed abortions. And in the following period, from 1957 to 1967, now practicing as a physician, I became confirmed in my belief that it was necessary to change the laws that prohibited abortion, since I regarded them as restrictive and unjust.
II. The Success of a Propaganda Campaign.
So in 1968 I organized a group called the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws. We caught our opponents sleeping. In this organization, which brought together all the forces that existed at the time in favor of abortion, we devised a series of tactics for our campaign. We told the public that ten to fifteen thousand women died each year because of clandestine abortions. In fact, we knew from our own research that the number was more like two or three hundred. We also invented highly persuasive and aggressive slogans, such as “a woman has the right to control her own body”, “freedom of choice”, “the Catholic conspiracy” and other similar ones.
We had extraordinary success. Working with a budget of seven or eight thousand dollars a year, we brought down the law in the State of New York in two years. Thanks to a web of lies and calculated intrigue, we managed to obtain, for the first time in the United States, a law that permitted abortion absolutely. We made New York the abortion capital of the country, while my colleagues described me in the press as the “king of abortion”. Of course, we did not consider ourselves satisfied merely with having achieved the decriminalization of abortion. We aspired to set in motion a whole massive operation that would allow any woman —including the poor— to obtain a cheap, quick, and safe abortion. And we established a clinic under the name Center for Sexual and Reproductive Health, a rather good euphemism for what, in the end, became a slaughterhouse. During the time I was director of the clinic, 60,000 abortions were performed, approximately 120 a day.
I myself, personally, have performed nearly five thousand abortions over the course of my life. The clinic generated an income of five million dollars a year. In fact, at the time it was the only facility of its kind. From 1970 to 1972, we attracted women from the eastern half of the United States, and never again will such a concentrated experience occur in a single place, since the Supreme Court’s ruling (in 1973) lifted the restrictions on abortion in all the States.
III. The Attack against the Catholic Church
Another very important tactic was to present the opposition to abortion as interference by the Catholic Church. It was not a matter of lashing out at the Pope, because focusing attention on a single man might arouse a reaction of sympathy. Let us also set aside condemning all Catholics, because that would dilute the issue too much. Besides, we were going to need some Catholic women to bring to the front, as a shield, to say that they were in favor of abortion. And so we did.
That is why we concentrated the attack on the bishops and the higher hierarchy, a group small enough to absorb the punishment and large enough to be obvious. I now think that if, in the propaganda of those years in which we attacked the Catholic Church, we had substituted the word “Catholic” with the word “black”, public opinion would have crushed us. But at that time it had become fashionable to lash out at the Catholic Church, and we took advantage of it.
For a slogan to be effective, an argument must be wielded. In this case, that the Church should not meddle in the affairs of the State. However, we all know that Martin Luther King was a Protestant minister and carried out one of the deepest social revolutions in the United States. We will also recall that some of the most active people in the abolition of slavery in Boston were members of the clergy. You will also hear that abortion is a medical problem, which should be left in the hands of doctors. But the fact that abortion is a medical technique does not make it a medical problem, just as the death penalty is not a matter for electrical engineers by virtue of the fact that the electric chair is used. Each year 1,300.000 abortions are performed in the United States, at an average of 350 dollars per abortion, which comes to 500 million dollars a year, going into the pockets of doctors and those responsible for the clinics. To leave a question such as abortion in the hands of those most economically interested in it is madness and irresponsibility.
IV. The Farce of Therapeutic Abortion
We also have quite a bit of experience in New York with the “therapeutic abortion” committees, back when, before 1970, abortion was only possible out of medical necessity. These committees, made up of three doctors in each hospital, ruled on the validity of each abortion request. Those committees soon became a farce. The abortion requests were invariably accompanied by two certificates issued by a psychiatrist, stating that the woman in question had suicidal tendencies because of the pregnancy.
Naturally, whenever I had a patient who wished to abort, I would send her to two psychiatrist friends of mine. They would issue the customary certificates —a routine task that took them no more than five minutes— and charge the customary hundred dollars. I would send the reports to the committee, which reviewed them, stamped its seal on them, and the patient quickly obtained the requested abortion. The committees were something utterly empty; they invited the discrediting and abuse of the law, and when it was abolished in 1970 they disbanded.
Another illustrative fact about so-called “therapeutic abortion” is the change that occurred in 1976, when Congress passed an amendment under which only abortions motivated by rape, incest, or because the mother’s life was in danger could be financed with public funds. Within a few months, the percentage of abortions paid for by the State fell to 2%. It was clear that the vast majority of abortions did not respond to any “medical necessity”.
V. Scientific Advances Opened My Eyes
I resigned from the position of director of the “Center for Sexual and Reproductive Health” at the end of 1972, not because I was disillusioned with abortion or because I had serious doubts, but because I had too many commitments, it was sapping my strength, and I felt worn out. Four months later I was asked to organize and direct the embryology and perinatology service at St. Luke’s Hospital, one of the most important in New York, belonging to Columbia University. This unit encompasses the medical disciplines that study the life cycle, the habits, the psychology, the sensitivity, and the physiology of the fetus.
This new branch of medicine has been made possible thanks to the achievements of certain technologies, such as ultrasound, immunochemistry, the fetal heart monitor, and other very complex techniques. There I had the opportunity to come into contact with these advances that have come to shed light on the dark field of the life of the fetus.
When I was a medical student at McGill University in Canada, we used a textbook known as Williams. It is still a classic text in medicine today. The edition I used was from 1947, the eighth, and it had 22 pages devoted to the fetus out of the total of 750 or 800 pages the book contained. It is currently in its sixteenth edition, published in 1980. It has 137 pages on the physiology of the fetus and another 127 on the diagnosis of embryonic diseases; this makes up roughly a third of the book, which is an index of the importance that the study of the fetus has taken on in the last eight or ten years, since the science of embryology was established.
Since I verified with absolute clarity, thanks to new techniques, that the fetus breathes, that it sleeps with perfectly defined sleep cycles, that it is sensitive to sounds —it has been proven that it reacts differently to different types of music—, to pain and to any other stimuli that you and I can perceive, it became inescapable to me that the fetus is one of us, of our community, that it is a life: a life that must be protected.
Even women who are decidedly in favor of abortion, when they are pregnant and undergo tests such as an ultrasound, come away impressed. Tremendous is the jolt one receives on seeing the fetus so close, on the monitor, moving, breathing, sucking its thumb, or scratching its nose, already at two and a half or three months of life.
It is a moving revelation, and I am convinced that going through this experience will become the most powerful argument for stopping the killing. The falseness of the abortion slogans. What, then, remains of the abortion slogans? Take that one of “Freedom of choice”. We are all in favor of choice. As long, of course, as the choice is an ethical choice. If one of the alternatives is not ethically acceptable, the choice does not withstand scrutiny: in fact, it is not a choice, and therefore “freedom of choice” is an empty slogan.
Suppose I am bankrupt: I can choose between working to earn money, or robbing a bank, or mugging you to take your wallet; but the last two are not ethical choices. That of “the right to control one’s own body” is another slogan of great appeal. Today, thanks to immunology, it is known with absolute certainty that the fetus is not a large part of the mother’s body. The white blood cells are able to recognize any body foreign to the organism and to set in motion the defense mechanisms to destroy it.
When the fetus implants in the wall of the uterus, the maternal immune system reacts to expel the intruder, but, naturally, the fetus is endowed with a delicate method of defense against this reaction. In some cases the defense is not as effective as it should be, and the fetus is expelled and is lost. This shows that the fetus is not a part of the mother’s body. It is simply there as a passing guest, and she cannot dispose of it.
VI. “I Am Not a Religious Man”
I am not a religious man; in fact, I have not been in a temple since I was thirteen. But I do want to tell you that we must stop that ineffective and destructive process, whose result is a greater dissolution of the family. We must reaffirm love among ourselves, especially for the smallest and most defenseless being. I now see abortion as an evil, ethically indefensible, in the light of our present knowledge about the unborn child.
Dr. Bernard Nathanson
Excerpt from the lecture given by Bernard Nathanson in Canberra (Australia) in February 1981, sponsored by the Association for the Right to Life.
Source: Apologetica.org
