An Ex-abortionist's Conversion, who was a key to America's legalization of abortion

Bernard Nathanson's Conversion 

by Julia Duin 

------------------------------------------------------------------
One cold January morning in 1989, Bernard Nathanson, famous Jewish 
abortionist-turned-atheistic-pro-lifer, began to entertain 
seriously the notion of God. Seven years later, thanks to a 
persistent Opus Dei priest, the sixty-nine-year-old doctor, author 
of Aborting America and The Abortion Papers, is becoming a Roman 
Catholic.
------------------------------------------------------------------

Even though pro-lifers have had him on their prayer lists for some 
time, Nathanson is still considered quite a big fish to reel in. 
Unique in the medical profession for having made a public 
turnabout on the abortion issue in the 1970s, he had been aware of 
being a spiritual target for nearly a decade. 

"I was not unmoved as time wore on," he now says. But back then, 
he was not letting on that he was gripped by despair, waking up 
mornings at 4 or 5 a.m., staring into the darkness or reading from 
St. Augustine's Confessions along with heavy-duty fare from other 
intellectuals: Dostoyevsky, Tillich, Kierkegaard, Niebuhr, Lewis 
Mumford, and Waldo Frank; what he termed the "literature of sin." 
As he read and pondered, the doctor realized his despondency had 
to do with just that, a worthy consideration in that, in his time, 
he had presided over 75,000 abortions and had helped sculpt the 
landscape from whence emerged Roe v. Wade in 1973. Sixteen years 
later, there was no escaping the interior dialogue that haunted 
and accused, then pointed out Albert Camus's central question of 
the twentieth century: Whether or not to commit suicide. A 
grandfather and sister had gone that route; his father had 
attempted to. 

Along came the fateful January morning at a Planned Parenthood 
Clinic on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where he witnessed 1,200 
Operation Rescue demonstrators wrapping their arms around each 
other, singing hymns, smiling at the police and the media. 
Nathanson, who was already well known for founding the National 
Abortion Rights Action League in 1968 and overseeing the world's 
largest abortion clinic before the advent of ultrasound in the 
1970s changed his mind forever on the subject, was writing a 
magazine article on the morality of clinic blockades. He circled 
about the demonstrators, doing interviews, taking notes, observing 
the faces. 

"It was only then," he writes in his new book, The Hand of God, 
"that I apprehended the exaltation, the pure love on the faces of 
that shivering mass of people, surrounded as they were by hundreds 
of New York City policemen." He listened as they prayed for the 
unborn, the women seeking abortions, the doctors and nurses in the 
clinic, the police, and reporters covering the event. 

"They prayed for each other but never for themselves," he writes. 
"And I wondered: How can these people give of themselves for a 
constituency that is (and always will be) mute, invisible and 
unable to thank them? 

"It was only then," he adds, "that I began seriously to question 
what indescribable Force generated them to this activity. Why, 
too, was I there? What had led me to this time and place? Was it 
the same Force that allowed them to sit serene and unafraid at the 
epicenter of legal, physical, ethical and moral chaos?" 

Prodded by an intellectual compulsion to find out more, Nathanson 
changed his reading material. His conversion was by now not "if;" 
it was "when." He plunged into Malcolm Muggeridge, Walker Percy, 
Graham Greene, Karl Stern, C. S. Lewis, Simone Weill, Richard 
Gilman, Blaise Pascal, and Cardinal Newman, all of whom had taken 
the path he was considering. 

By then he had already gotten to know John McCloskey, an Opus Dei 
priest based in Princeton with a doctorate in theology and a 
reputation for helping intellectual seekers. 

"He'd heard I was prowling around the edges of Catholicism," the 
doctor says. "He contacted me and we began to have weekly talks. 
He'd come to my house and give me reading materials. He guided me 
down the path to where I am now. I owe him more than anyone else." 

Other than McCloskey, the biggest influence on Nathanson's 
decision was Karl Stern, a world-renowned psychoanalyst who was 
one of his professors in the 1940s at McGill University Medical 
College in Montreal. Stern had converted from Orthodox Judaism to 
Catholicism in 1943 and later chronicled his spiritual journey in 
Pillar of Fire. Nathanson never knew of this until 1974, when he 
discovered a tattered copy of Stern's book. Nathanson would return 
to this book again and again, fascinated with how Stern could use 
his brilliant mind to embrace faith and adopt as his heroine 
Teresa of Avila, a doctor of the Church. Nathanson found Stern's 
demeanor exquisitely sensitive to the doubts and questions of 
intellectuals who struggled with how much to allow for reason, how 
much to turn over to faith. 

By then, Nathanson had been involved in abortion for nearly thirth 
years, beginning in 1945 when he persuaded a pregnant girlfriend 
to abort their child, which, he says, "served as excursion into 
the satanic world of abortion." Years later, he impregnated 
another woman and aborted that child himself. He was directing the 
country's largest abortion clinic in New York. 

"What is it like to terminate the life of your own child?" he 
writes in the book. "I have aborted the unborn children of my 
friends, my colleagues, casual acquaintances, even my teachers. 
There was never a shred of self-doubt, never a wavering of the 
supreme self-confidence that I was doing a major service to those 
who sought me out." 

Still, his confidence was wavering by the early 1970s. Ultrasound, 
a new technology, was making it clear that what was in the womb 
could suck its thumb and do other human-like things, and thus 
Nathanson began distancing himself first from the clinic, then 
from abortions altogether. In 1984, he premiered a movie, The 
Silent Scream, that showed an ultrasound of a child being aborted. 
The spectacle of such film backed by a cofounder of NARAL lent it 
credibility and created a sensation. Pro-lifers scrambled to watch 
it; pro-choicers repudiated their former ally. 

But Nathanson was no angel of light. He had already broken the 
Hippocratic Oath, which forbids abortions; he was failing at the 
upbringing of his one son, Joseph, now thirty, and he was plowing 
through his second and third marriages with a vengeance. His 
divorce from his third wife, Adelle, is final this spring. 

For a while, he tried therapy, self-help books, counseling, and 
spiritualities ranging from theosophy to Swedenborgianism while 
finding his Judaism inadequate at best. Except for his first 
marriage in a Jewish ceremony and getting his son bar mitzvahed, 
he had hardly functioned as a Jew after his midteens. Still he 
went to speak with two rabbis, one Orthodox and the other 
Conservative, about his doubts. 

"I was looking for a way to wash away my sins," he says. "There's 
no such formal mechanism for doing that in Judaism. One can atone 
for sins, as in Yom Kippur, but that doesn't absolve you. That's 
not to condemn the religion but I just didn't find in it what I 
needed." 

Another Orthodox rabbi, David Lapin, founder of the Mercer Island, 
Wash.-based Toward Tradition, wonders if Nathanson ever understood 
his Jewish faith. 

"Atonement is the action that leads to absolution," he says, "and 
absolution is only granted during the Day of Atonement. Then there 
are steps taken throughout the year that include rejecting the 
wrong and resolving not to repeat it again." 

There may be a deeper reason to Nathanson's disenchantment, the 
rabbi guesses, which has to do with the high level of Jews 
involved in the abortion business. Nathanson has written of the 
high percentage of Jewish abortionists. The new national leader of 
Planned Parenthood, who comes on board in June, is Gloria Feldt, a 
Jew. 

"I believe that Bernard Nathanson's conversion to Catholicism is 
spurred not by theological deficiencies in a Judaism I don't 
believe he knew but by a deep compelling desire to distance 
himself from a faith whose secular wing has embraced abortion with 
a fervor," Lapin says. 

"And there's no question about it. Boston Herald columnist Don 
Feder points out nearly half of the religious organizations 
endorsing abortion are Jewish in spite of Jews being 2.3 percent 
of the U.S. population, not 50 percent. The Jewish community is 
disproportionately represented in the pro-abortion movement. This 
taking up the cudgels for abortion is not by any means an 
expression of Judaism. It is a rejection of God and a rejection of 
the religious core of Judaism, and in those terms I understand why 
Bernard Nathanson had to seek another faith." 

Nathanson also felt he had to seek something that had the 
theological construct he needed to face his sin. Life's twilight 
was approaching and inexorable judgment looming, and the doctor 
was entranced by the idea of going round and round in one of 
Dante's seven circles of hell. 

"I felt the burden of sin growing heavier and more insistent," he 
writes. "I have such heavy moral baggage to drag into the next 
world that failing to believe would condemn me to an eternity 
perhaps more terrifying than anything Dante envisioned in his 
celebration of the redemptive fall and rise of Easter. I am 
afraid." 

He began casting about for a system that provided space for guilt 
and could assure him "that someone died for my sins and my evil 
two millennia ago. 

"The New Testament God was a loving, forgiving, incomparably 
cossetting figure in whom I would seek, and ultimately find, the 
forgiveness I have pursued so hopelessly, for so long." 

McCloskey, now 42, was half Nathanson's age when he met the doctor 
nine years ago and was all too glad to help along the way. The 
well-read priest was Nathanson's intellectual equal, able to 
discuss everything from medieval Jewish philosophers like Spinoza 
to Etienne Gilson, a twentieth century French philosopher as 
Nathanson wrestled with his questions. 

"He's receptive, he's a listener, and he speaks the language of 
reason and erudition," Nathanson says of his instructor. "He's 
simpatico with someone like myself who's seeking faith but still 
wants reason - a difficult language to speak simultaneously. 

"I needed faith but I needed reason to prop me up. Reason was a 
safety net for the leap of faith," he said, borrowing the term 
from Kierkegaard. "You can remove the net, but only after you've 
made the leap." 

Nathanson was likewise fascinated with Luke the evangelist, who 
besides being a physician was also a credible first-century 
historian. Reading Luke and Acts was essential to Nathanson's slow 
switch to Christianity as he grasped Luke's point that the 
unbelievable events such as a physical resurrection of the dead 
were possible and had actually happened. 

"It requires true courage to admit not only you're wrong but 
you're awfully wrong," McCloskey says. "He is a man of goodwill 
and a man interested in pursuing the truth no matter what the 
cost. I think he's been doing enormous penance for the pro-life 
cause since the late '70s when he changed his mind. In a human 
sense, he's been making reparation. The cross of Jesus Christ and 
the sacrament of baptism washes away any guilt and temporal 
punishment for his sins. Once he's baptized, he's a different man. 
That's the whole essence of Christianity." 

Nathanson has since taken off a year to take courses at the 
Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University. He then 
wrote the book, floating through which are occasional references 
to his new love: Jesus Christ, as opposed to his old love: 
himself. He is considering changing careers and taking up a 
teaching position at a hospital, possibly a Catholic one. There 
are several offers. He attends a parish in Manhattan's Chelsea 
district where soon he will stand before the baptismal font and 
renounce forever the world, the flesh, and the devil. 

"I will be free from sin," he says. "For the first time in my 
life, I will feel the shelter and warmth of faith." 

Julia Duin is the culture page editor for The Washington Times.

© 1995-1996 Crisis Magazine

This article was taken from the June 1996 issue of "Crisis" 
magazine. To subscribe please write: Box 1006, Notre Dame, IN 
46556 or call 1-800-852-9962. Subscriptions are $25.00 per year. 
Editorial correspondence should be sent to 1511 K Street, N.W., 
Ste. 525, Washington, D.C., 20005, 202-347-7411; E-mail: 
75061.1144@compuserve.com.

-------------------------------------------------------

   Provided courtesy of:

        Eternal Word Television Network
        PO Box 3610
        Manassas, VA 22110
        Voice: 703-791-2576
        Fax: 703-791-4250
        Data: 703-791-4336
        Web: http://www.ewtn.com
        FTP: ewtn.com
        Telnet: ewtn.com
        Email address: sysop@ ewtn.com

   EWTN provides a Catholic online 
   information and service system.

-------------------------------------------------------