Today Dr. Bernard Nathanson will be remembered at a funeral Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Remarkably, this comes from the Washington Post obituary of him:
He trained thousands of doctors to perform abortions and estimated that he personally ended 5,000 pregnancies. One of his patients in the 1960s, he later wrote, was his pregnant girlfriend.
But new technology, including ultrasound imagery and recordings of fetal brain and heart function, caused him to quit providing abortion services.
“For the first time, we could really see the human fetus, measure it, watch it, and indeed bond with it and love it,” he wrote in his 1996 autobiography, “The Hand of God.” “I began to do that.”
He catapulted himself into the center of the roiling abortion debate of the mid-1980s with a 28-minute film called “The Silent Scream.”
The movie uses ultrasound photography to show the real-time abortion of a 12-week-old fetus – grainy images that, according to Dr. Nathanson’s narration, show a violent and frightening process.
“Once again, we see the child’s mouth wide open in a silent scream,” he says as the doctor inserts a suction tube. “For the first time, we are going to watch a child being torn apart, dismembered, disarticulated, crushed and destroyed by the unfeeling steel instruments of the abortionist.”
The film – bolstered by the back story of Dr. Nathanson’s high-profile about-face – became a sensation, widely distributed by antiabortion groups and screened at the White House by President Ronald Reagan, who urged members of Congress to see the movie and “move quickly to end the tragedy of abortion.”
Abortion rights advocates criticized the film as inaccurate and emotionally manipulative but recognized its influence. In 1985, then-Planned Parenthood of America chairman Allan Rosenfield called the film “the most powerful thing the right-to-life movement has put out.”