Doctors are ‘Sheep,’ NARAL Founder Turned Pro-Life Activist Tells Harvard Law School

By Geraldine Hawkins
May 14, 2003

Dr. Bernard Nathanson did as much as any single individual to make abortion legal and acceptable, including founding the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). In a remarkable turnaround, he later made The Silent Scream, a film depicting the experience of an aborted baby that has become one of the pro-life movement's most effective tools of persuasion.

"The core evil of abortion is that it's the perversion of autonomy," Nathanson told the students. "In this country we have deified autonomy. We are not paying attention to the ties that bind us to community, church, etc.

"Abortion is clearly violence. It is a choice made in a moral vacuum," he said.

Nathanson is a Roman Catholic convert who lectures on the evils of abortion. His story, along with a film depicting the latest developments in fetal surgery, was warmly received by members of Harvard Law School's Society for Law, Life, and Religion earlier this month.

"In my third year of medical school, my girlfriend became pregnant. We found an old man in Montreal, who wanted 500 dollars in cash, to perform the abortion.

"She was bleeding profusely. This ignited in me a sense of legal and social outrage."

At that time, Nathanson was a doctor in a poor section of Harlem, "where beds were full of women suffering from botched abortions."

In February 1969, Laurence Lader, Betty Freidan and Nathanson founded NARAL.

"We were successful until 1973 when Roe v. Wade took care of the rest for us."

Nathanson said that at the clinic in New York over which he presided, over 120 abortions a day were performed.

An Individual Human Being

"I then spent a year as a bio-ethicist at the Kennedy School of Ethics -- not an oxymoron, by the way - where I began to explore the concept of the person, e.g. is an embryo or a fetus a person? The Oxford English Dictionary defines a person as 'an individual human being.'

"That's what it is from the moment of conception," Nathanson said. "I become chilled when I hear the word 'person' bandied about, because it implies strongly that there are 'non-persons.' In Nazi Germany, 'non-persons' like Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and others were incarcerated and killed.

"In California, the killing of an unborn baby without its mother's consent is homicide. That's why Laci Peterson's husband is being charged on two counts of homicide."

"In 1973, I decided I had had enough. I was overcommitted and exhausted."

Nathanson said that one of the developments that helped to change his mind about abortion was the advance in technology which enabled doctors to observe the way in which babies develop.

"For the first time, we could see the baby in utero and watch it dream and swallow and do everything an infant does. I began to ask myself some hard questions.

"I wrote an article called 'Deeper into Abortion,' in which I simply raised some questions. For my pains I was drummed out of NARAL."

Nathanson said this was a lonely time for him.

"Doctors wouldn't talk to me because I was performing abortions. NARAL wasn't speaking to me.

"In 1978, I turned pro-life. I was still a confirmed atheist, if atheists can be confirmed. I'm fond of quoting Chesterton, who said, 'If there were no God, there would be no atheists.'"

The Silent Scream

Nathanson made a film in 1984 called The Silent Scream, which came about because he wanted to know precisely what happens during an abortion.

"We put the suction in the womb and out comes chopped up meat that hardly resembles a fetus, but President Reagan had indicated that a fetus feels pain during an abortion. The film consists simply of the tapes we put together of the process.

"It is the most widely viewed documentary film of all time and has saved thousands of babies' lives. This is what I'm told."

Nathanson was received into the Catholic Church in 1996. During this period, his autobiography, The Hand of God, was published by the Henry Regnery Co.

"One of the issues that have always played to this conflict is, does abortion have long-term adverse affects on the woman? Yes!

"Women who have had abortions are more susceptible to breast cancer, premature labor in the next pregnancy, mood disorders, and increased probability of developing an infection in the womb."

Nathanson said that RU486, the French abortion pill which was legalized in the United States two years ago, was heralded as a huge triumph, but last year only 6% of abortions were done with the pill.

"The media doesn't tell you why," Nathanson said. "The woman experiences intolerable abdominal pain, she has to expel the dead fetus, and then bring the dead fetus to the doctor in a sack."

Stem Cells and Cloning

Nathanson referred to cloning as "a radical form of child abuse," that would lead to "the despotism of the cloners over the cloned." He said it reminded him of a quote from Leon Kass: "How shallow the souls of those who have forgotten how to shudder."

Nathanson said that stem-cell research has been going on in animals for 22 years, and has yet to provide any clues.

"In the '80s and '90s, fetal cell research - using tissue from dead babies to treat people with brain disorders - was hyped, but nobody got better," he said. "The whole fight over embryonic stem cells is absurd and unnecessary.

"Fetal cells do not come from the same person, they come from someone else. If you take bone marrow from a boy and inject it into his own heart, he may get better.

"Doctors are the most stone-headed people in the world. When I get invitations to speak to doctors, I turn them down.

"They have enough exposure to the facts [about abortion and related issues]. Time will do it.

"Doctors will start caving in when the rest of the population starts caving in. They are followers," he said. "They are sheep."