Dr. Bernard Nathanson
Giants are interesting creatures, and Dr. Bernard Nathanson was a giant. He was also the smallest man in the world, depending on who was critiquing him, and what phase of his career the individual was examining. He certainly was a hero to the pro-abort camp early on, and the most misguided man in the world to pro-lifers. Then all of that changed when Dr. Nathanson had his epiphany.
I was a boy back then, nine years old in 1969 when he founded NARAL, twelve on the day that Roe v Wade was handed down. At this moment, I’m not particularly interested in Dr. Bernard Nathanson as the pro-life giant, or trophy, or mentor and guide after his conversion. I’m more interested in Dr. Nathanson as a doctor, as a fellow scientist, and how he could have lost his way, and how he found his way.
We can be so smug, scientists and physicians—so in love with our technology. So superior. So proud.
Having a love of history, and an appreciation for its treacherous cross-currents was my salvation when I was in graduate school. Yes, I loved the state-of-the-art in molecular biology, and how that grew every couple of years. But I was also keen to know from my professors what the state of the art was when they were graduate students, how they came to understand science and the tools through which they developed their understanding of life and its mechanisms.
It filled me with awe and respect for them, how they worked with such comparatively primitive tools and discovered the most fundamental realities. It showed me how much we younger scientists take for granted, and how we rarely step outside of our own technological frame of reference to appreciate the manner in which our predecessors blazed the trail for us.
So Dr. Nathanson’s has been an interesting story for me. In the late 1960′s, there were many in the field of embryology who taught that a new human organism came into being at fertilization. This was, in a sense, a no-brainer. But physicians and scientists don’t always see things the same way. What jumps out at me was Dr. Nathanson’s flawed understanding of human embryology that justified for him his pro-abortion orientation.
Ernst Haeckel's Fudged Drawings
Though many maintained that the human embryo was human, there was a fraud that was perpetuated for over 100 years, as seen here in the fraudulent drawings of Dr. Ernst Haeckel, that led many into honestly believing that the embryo was not fully human.
Haeckel was an early proponent of Darwinian evolution who maintained that organisms go through the various evolutionary stages (phylogeny) as they develop into mature form (ontogeny), recapitulating their evolutionary heritage. Even I was educated in high school and college in the famous mantra, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”
The big problem was that Haeckel fudged his drawings to make the organisms appear to look more similar than they actually are; all to make the appearance of recapitulation look more valid.
Haeckel lied, and that lie evolved into the cornerstone of justifying abortion because the embryo was still in its fish stage, or amphibian stage. Read a good treatment here.
So, Haeckel lied, and babies died. His deception, meant to advance what he believed to be a greater truth, has led to the slaughter of millions.
It wasn’t until the advent of fetoscopy and sonograms that Dr. Nathanson could move beyond Haeckel’s static (and fraudulent) illustrations. Technology allowed him to see what his ill-formed scientific imagination could not fathom.
A baby sucking its thumb.
A beating heart.
Playful movements.
A silent scream.
I think of the Gospel on Easter Sunday with Peter and John in the tomb. John saw and believed. Peter was befuddled, slower to catch on.
I think of Paul on the road to Damascus. He saw and believed.
Dr. Nathanson saw and believed. Like Paul, his turnaround was as powerful for good as his previous state was for ill.
It wasn’t religion that did it for Dr. Nathanson. It was technology revealing undeniable truth.
Dr. Nathanson was first and foremost a man of science. He was guided by reason, and when reason told him that he was mistaken, he followed the truth. He did so knowing that he would be reviled, but that didn’t stop him.
It was a crushing blow to the other side to have Dr. Nathanson defect. Their argument was that pro-lifers were motivated by religious extremism, and then Dr. Nathanson produced The Silent Scream. Religious conversion would be some years yet to come. He was reviled. Knowing how Dr. Nathanson’s intellect was formed, the fraudulent data that went into it, helps me to see how he could have been pro-abortion. He honestly didn’t believe he was killing a human.
I’m sorry that I never had the opportunity to meet him, to share a meal with him, to see more of the world of the 1960′s through his eyes. In some ways, we came to pro-life education and activism by the same route: it was the technology and data that did it for me too. I always accepted the humanity of the embryo, but the mountains of scientific literature on STD’s and post-abortive sequelae cry out for scientists and physicians to give them a voice in the public square.
I would have liked to have shared experiences with this elder scientist and learned from him. Now I’ll need to wait a bit longer before that meeting. Until then, a man who helped unleash one of the greatest calamities to befall humanity, and lived to repent of it, equipping the pro-life movement to fight for its destruction, has passed from among us and into eternity. For all that he did to stop this evil, for his road from atheistic Jew to faith-filled Catholic, Dr. Nathanson was a giant.
But he also seemed more to be a good and decent man.
Beautifully written and a wonderful tribute to a courageous man! I remember struggling to learn the words, “Ontogeny recapitulates philogeny” as a tween and feeling proud to learn it, never questioning “evolution” until I read the Scientific American issue dedicated to it in 1978 and was absolutely shocked to read that “macro evolution” has never been observed in the laboratory (and not that they haven’t tried for decades) and that there are huge gaps in the theory. This led to a lifelong research – others must have tred this path also because there have been some books now like Phillip Johnson’s “DARWIN ON TRIAL” which I would really recommend. Great blog! Thanks!
Beautiful, just beautiful. And so interesting to see the development of a scientist’s beliefs and conscience through the eyes of a scientist. Thanks, Dr. Gerry!
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Lisa Mladinich, Gerard M. Nadal. Gerard M. Nadal said: Requiem for a Good Man http://wp.me/pJSAY-1gr [...]
Mommy’s Baby
By Mike McCracken
A baby gets conceived today
Unexpectedly
Who’d of believed
Mommy, I’m your baby
Mommy knows about me
She doesn’t seem too happy
Don’t like the way it feels
Because it’s real
Mommy wakes up sick
I’m sorry mommy
I accidentally kick
Please forgive me
She calls the abortion Doctor
Helplessly, I lay here
Mommy please don’t kill me
I’m your baby
I’m starting to grow
Mommy, I love you
Just wanted you to know
And I want to tell you
We are at the abortion clinic
She won’t go through with it
Mommy, how could you kill me?
I’m your baby.
Abortion is just another name for murdering your unborn- children.
Dr. Nadal, I appreciate the perspective and the erroneous information that many people latched onto in order to justify their positions and behavior.
Yet on the other hand, as a lawyer who studied the history of abortion laws in England and the U.S., I can’t help feeling that those who wanted abortion legal (and this may have included Dr. Nathanson) knew that an abortion killed a child but believed that the mother’s choice was more important. The early proponents of abortion lied about the child in the womb. Yet these same proponents had previously passed out the 1963 Planned Parenthood pamphlet that explained contraception was not abortion. “Abortion,” the pamphlet explained, “kills the life of a baby after it has begun.”
Perhaps in the effort to bring down the law, they did not care. After all they manufactured the lie about “10,000 women dying each year from illegal abortions.” They attacked the Catholic Church as the sinister opponent of women. He, Lawrence Lader, and Harriet Pippel influenced an easily seduced media to promote this poison.
Yet it is true that his concerns prompted his insightful article in 1974 in the New England Journal of Medicine. And he received the full brunt of an assault by the abortion industry that would have destroyed a lesser man.
In my conversations with him, one could see his own struggle to explain why he did what he did, knowing what he really knew.
But it was the Church that he had previously attacked who soon (1996) became his final solace and lasting support. A showering of mercy that gave him a sense he could go on living.
So we pray for a man whose life and whose autobiography will be studied in years to come as a reflection not only of a turbulent century, but of the amazing power of God’s merciful healing love.
John,
Thank you for your comments. Not knowing Dr. Nathanson personally, I can only go with his dramatic turn-around once he saw a sonogram. I’m left to surmise that if indeed he didn’t think the embryo fully human, that his abortion advocacy was truly based on getting women away from back alley practitioners and into more mainstream and competent hands. I can see that he felt so passionately about this that he was willing to goose the numbers in order to get abortion legalized.
I go gently on Dr. Nathanson for several reasons. First, as I said, when technology presented him with incontrovertible data, he followed the truth at great personal cost. Those were very politically charged times with the founding of NARAL and the subsequent Roe decision coming against the backdrop of the assassinations of Dr. King, Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X, the Vietnam war at its height, Watergate, the race riots, etc. It was sheer madness, and I’m glad that I was shielded from the brunt of it by childhood.
I also go gently because Dr. Nathanson, against that turbulent backdrop, was an atheistic Jew, with the holocaust and the existential threat faced by Israel being very real and recent. He didn’t have the benefit of Christian Anthropology to form his worldview, which was compounded by the errors stemming from Haeckel’s lies.
Finally, I resist the temptation to view the past through the lens of perspective that has been formed by the intervening technology. I envy your conversations with him. He seems to have been a genuinely good man who did all that he could to atone for his sin.
Dr. Nadal,
That time period was in many respects “sheer madness” and Dr. Nathanson to the extent he was acting, always believed, both when he was promoting abortion, as when he later opposed it, that he was doing what he thought was right. I think though that he embrace of the technology was a means of giving people who were like him – a way out of the pro-abortion camp – and to the extent he could say – LOOK – and show them the baby in the womb, he could help people embrace the pro-life view.
The pro-life movement saved many lives through The Silent Scream and Eclipse of Reason. His talks changed many lives. He became a tool of Our Loving Savior and helped many people to know the truth.
My comments were not to seem harsh. I knew him, although not as well as many of my colleagues, as he carried the guilt of his actions. He intellectually knew of God’s love and forgiveness. He found peace in the Church. But he carried the cross of his past. It was in a sense – his purgatory. Now we pray he is at peace in the loving arms of God.