Dr.Nathanson-"I lived the great lie"
“Graduated in Magill University, he did his doctorate in Bioethics in the Search Centre, Ethical Clinic, of the University of Vanderbilt, Nashville, Tennesee, in the United States. At present he is Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in the Medical College of New York and Resident Scholar in the University of Vanderbilt. Doctor Nathanson exposes his inspiring story with tireless honesty in his books “The Hand of God”, “America Aborting”...
You have before you a mass murderer. I am directly responsible for the deaths of seventy five thousand innocent children. How did I reach this point in my career, having sworn many years earlier to take care of the sick and to protect life.
My story begins with my upbringing in New York City. I was brought up as a Jew, I went to the Hebrew school three times a week, I went to Sunday school once every week, and when I returned home from the school, my father, who had been trained as a Rabbi but who later broke with the Jewish faith, used to ask me questions about what I had learned in the Hebrew school, and when I answered him he would start laughing and ridiculing me, he would ridicule and mock my answers. And there was a steady breakdown of my sense of faith. I continued my Jewish formation until I was thirteen years of age when I was received by the Jewish community as an adult. After this I never again set foot in a synagogue in my life. My faith had been completely destroyed. I was what many people would call a Jewish atheist.
I went to medical college and there I had my first experience of abortion. My girlfriend became pregnant. We decided that it was impossible for us to get married, so we found an ancient doctor in Montreal who undertook to do the abortion. I paid him with money that my father had sent me. The woman had the abortion, but she almost died, and I helped to nurse her back to health. And this was the beginning of my sense of social outrage against the laws restricting abortion, making it illegal. Some years later, I spent a period of training in obstetrics and gynaecology in a hospital in New York City, where fully half of the hospital beds were occupied by women who had had abortions and were very sick or dying, which stimulated further still my feeling of outrage.
I met a man who was determined to strike down all of the anti-abortion laws in the United States and together we formed a political action group, known as the National Abortion Rights League. And we were remarkably successful. Within two years we had struck down a law restricting abortion in the State of New York. The law had been in the penal codes since 1829. Following the overthrowal of the old law, it was clear that we had to implement the new law. It was not enough simply to say that abortion was legal; we also had to make it low cost, not expensive, safe and humane. Allow me to emphasise here, when I say “humane”, that at this time, in 1971, we knew nothing about the human embryo or fetus, nothing. We had no means of seeing it, or studying it, or measuring it, or of confirming that it was a human being, so the scales were profoundly unbalanced. All of our concern was for the pregnant woman. And we had very little, or no concern, for the baby.
I began to run an abortion clinic in New York. It was the biggest abortion clinic in the western world. It operated from 8.00 in the morning to 12.00 at night every day. I had thirty-five doctors and eighty-five nurses working for me. We performed a hundred and twenty abortions every day. There were ten operating theatres. During my time as director we performed sixty thousand abortions. I have supervised visiting doctors in practice performing another ten thousand abortions and with my own hands I have done five thousand abortions. So in my life I have seventy-five thousand abortions, the deaths of seventy-five thousand innocent children. During my time as directer a woman friend of mine became pregnant and even though she did not want it I persuaded her to have an abortion. She wanted the best abortionist of all, and of course that was me. So I performed the abortion, I executed my own child. I did it coldly, without feeling, surgically. It was just another procedure for me.
It is interesting that during my time as director of the clinic, many of the wives of the doctors complained to me that their husbands weren’t sleeping well, that they had nightmares, that they screamed about the blood on their hands. Many of the doctors fell into alcoholism, drug addiction, sexual affairs with the nurses. Some of the doctors were openly smoking marijuana in the clinic. I had to dismiss them. But there was a huge price that had to be paid for this activity: the doctors were earning enormous amounts of money but their souls were being destroyed. I, meanwhile, was living the big lie. I want to quote here a brief paragraph from the Confessions of St. Augustine. He says: “I joined a group of comrades and sensualists, men with glib tongues that ranted and raved and who had the snares of the devil in their mouths. They baited the hook confusing the syllables of the name of God the Father, God the Son Our Lord Jesus Christ and God the Holy Spirit, the Paraclite who comforts us. ‘The truth and only the truth’ was the slogan that they repeated to me over and over again, although the truth was nowhere to be found in them”. This was the group that I fell into. I had enormous success, earning huge amounts of money. I owned many houses, boats, aeroplanes, wine cellars, estates, women, everything. I had everything, but I had nothing more than the big lie, the lie that the person in the womb counts for nothing.
When I left the clinic after several years, I became director of obstetrics in St. Luke’s Hospital in New York City, and it was around then that we began to introduce all the sophisticated technology that we have today. I am referring to sound monitoring, to the electronic measurement of the heartbeat of the foetus, and other sophisticated techniques. And for the first time we were able to study the human being in the mother’s womb. And to our great surprise we discovered that it was no different in any way to the rest of us, that it ate, slept, drank fluids, and dreamed - we were actually able to measure the dreams - that it sucked its thumb and behaved exactly the same as a newborn infant. And from that moment, as the data began to pile up and accumulate, the truth began to dawn upon me.The great lie had come to an end. The truth was that this was a human being who deserved our protection and respect, a human being with the dignity that God had bestowed upon it and that should not be destroyed or harmed.
After three or four years of studying the foetus, I became pro-life. I changed my mind on the subject of abortion, I began to question the ethical and moral standards of those who practised abortion, I gave conferences against abortion, and finally, I made two films that showed the human foetus during an abortion. One of them was called “The Silent Scream”, and it shows a twelve-week-old baby being suctioned to death in the womb. You can actually see the instrument of suction entering into the womb and sucking off the arms and the legs of the baby, splitting open the abdomen, sucking out the organs from the abdomen and then crushing the baby’s head with a forceps and extracting it from the womb. It is a very powerful film. The pro-abortionists denied everything, of course, but I challenged them to make a similar film demonstrating to me what happens in an abortion, to show me where my film had gone wrong. They never did it. They knew what they were going to see.
When I took stock of my life at the beginning of the eighties, I had a great amount of money, houses, immense wine cellars and all the rest, I had, in summary, as I have said, everything and nothing; I had to contemplate in my past three failed marriages, a son who was emotionally unbalanced and the greatest weight of all, was the souls of seventy-five thousand innocent children whom I had destroyed. And I want to tell you that this is a daunting prospect, a frightening moral baggage to bring into the next life. Of course, I dedicated myself diligently to denying that there was an eternal life, but secretly I knew there was. There was something that constantly reminded me of it, like the blows of a hammer.
I was demoralised, depressed, even suicidal. I had thoughts of suicide. I turned once again to Augustine. He says: “What is any man, if he is no more than a man? Let the strong and the powerful laugh at me, and let us, the weak and the poor, confess our sins to You”.
As I agonised over my life and indeed over whether or not to continue it, I met a kind priest at a pro-life encounter. This priest later became my Virgil who guided me through Hell and through Purgatory into Paradise. We established a dialogue that went on for seven years and at the end of this time I was convinced that I had learned the truth, and the great lie no longer dominated my life, and on the 9th of December 1996, Cardinal John O’Connor received me into the Catholic Church.
My pro-life work began to come not from the brain, but from the soul, from the heart. It is best described by the Holy Father when he said the following: “This matter is often presented as the right of the woman to a free choice concerning the life that is already existing inside her, that she carries in her womb; the woman should have the right to choose between giving or taking away the life of the unborn child. Anyone can see that the alternatives proposed here are only apparent. It is not possible to speak of the right to choose when a clear moral evil is involved, when what is at stake is the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’”. This is how we must think regarding this subject of abortion. To think any other way is to let oneself be led along strange and dangerous pathways.
So, I was baptised by Cardinal O’Connor, and I remember the winter morning in December very clearly. I remembered that when I was a student of medicine in my fourth year in the University of Montreal, I had a professor of psychiatry, Doctor Karl Stern, an Austrian Jew, who was very fond of me and who in fact tried to persuade me to be a psychiatrist, an idea which didn’t appeal to me in the slightest. But he was a kind and excellent professor and I had a great affection for him. This was in the year 1949. What I didn’t know in this period when he was teaching me, was that he himself was undergoing the process of conversion to Catholicism. And subsequently he wrote a book about his conversion, which was called “The Pillar of Fire”. And in it, in the final pages, he described the day on which he was baptised. He says: “I will never forget the morning of my First Communion. Exteriorly it was like any other December morning”. And then he writes: “And there wasn’t the slightest doubt about it: towards Him we had been running or from Him we had been fleeing, but all the time He had been in the centre of things”.
So allow me to close with these comments: “Love is the most durable force in the world. This creative power so beautifully exemplified in the life of Christ is the most potent instrument available in humanity’s incessant search for peace and justice”.
© HM Magazine No. 110 - January/February 2003
