How the Abortion movement started with lies - Dr Nathanson on Abortion
How did the abortion movement start? We gain some revealing insights from Dr Bernard
Nathanson, who was a key person repealing the US abortion laws. He supervised the first and
largest abortion ‘clinic’ in the world, the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health in New
York City. In the first year, this Center had performed more than 60,000 abortions. Dr
Nathanson became deeply troubled by the insight that he had presided over sixty thousand
deaths and changed his position to being anti-abortion. Dr Nathanson describes the tactics used
to make abortion acceptable and how he changed his mind. He states [1]:
Notes:
[1] Dr Nathanson is quoted in John Powell, Abortion: the silent Holocaust. Tabor, Allen, Texas. 1981. p. 75ff
[2] Bernard Nathanson, Richard Ostling. Aborting America. Pinnacle Books. New York 1979.
[3] Bernard Nathanson. Deeper into Abortion. New England Journal of Medicine. 28 November 1974.
‘We fed the public a line of deceit, dishonesty, a fabrication of statistics and figures. We succeeded [in breaking down the laws limiting abortions] because the time was right and the news media cooperated. We sensationalized the effects of illegal abortions, and fabricated polls which indicated that 85% of the public favoured unrestricted abortion, when we knew it was only 5%. We unashamedly lied, and yet our statements were quoted [by the media] as though they had been written in law.’Dr Nathanson furthermore states some of the lies told by the pro-abortion movement. [2]
‘There was only silence from the opposition. We fed a line of deceit, of dishonesty, of fabrication of statistics and figures; we coddled, caressed, and stroked the press. (…) We were calling ourselves pro-abortionists and pro-choice. In fact what we were were abortifiers: those who like abortion. Let me digress and speak for a moment on the question of ‘pro-choice’, as they euphemistically call themselves now. I reject that phrase, that euphemism. It is misleading. It is dishonest. It implies that in the issue of abortion there is an ethical choice whether to have an abortion or whether not to have an abortion;…Of course… abortion is not an ethical choice. In February of 1971, I organized and ran the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health, another amusing euphemism for an abortion clinic. It was not just an abortion clinic. It was the abortion clinic. It was in New York and curiously, it was established and fed by the Clergy Consultation Service, an organisation of twelve hundred Protestant Ministers and Jewish Rabbis who took it upon themselves to funnel through 60,000 young women in the space of 19 months that I ran it. The Clergy Consultation Service – I’d never known that clergymen were actively involved in abortion before, but my eyes were opened. … It was a $5 million-a-year business. Think now how many handicapped children could be helped, how much cancer research could be done, how many operations of a decent sort could be carried out on poor people with that kind of money!’
‘The discussion… has been muddied by a resort to a particularly vicious brand of anti- Catholicism, as many of you know, in the press. There have been ongoing attempts to paint this movement [the pro-life movement] as a Catholic movement, and there have been almost heartbreaking lies and libel in the press on this score. If you ever substituted for the word Catholic, in many of these publications the word Jewish or black, you would be immediately castigated. The press would destroy you. However, because the word Catholic is used, it appears to be allowable.’
‘Why did I change my mind? Well, to begin with, it was not from a religious conviction, … I am an Atheist… In any case, the change of mind began with the realization, the inescapable reality that the fetus, that embryo, is a person, is a protectable human life. The change also began on the basis of my own secular belief in the golden rule: if you would not have your own life taken away from you, you must not take someone else’s life.’
- Before the repeal of the abortion laws, in order for an abortion to go ahead, Psychiatrists would incorrectly certify that a pregnant women was so distressed as to contemplate suicide, therefore allowing an abortion to be carried out (p 40).
- One abortion ‘doctor’ was not a doctor. If pressed, he stated that he had a PhD in clinical psychology from an University that did not even exist. The same person also had several convictions, one for attempted murder after trying to use a nutcracker to abort an abortion in a woman in a motel room (p 91) He developed a ‘super coil’ abortion method which was performed on 11 women on one day in 1972. out of the 11 women, one required a hysterectomy and two women had to be admitted for complications. (p 90).
- The statistics of maternal mortality due to self-induced abortion were grossly exaggerated. Dr Nathanson writes: ‘how many deaths were we talking about when abortion was illegal? In NARAL (National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws) we generally emphasized the drama of the individual case, not the mass statistics, but when we spoke of the latter it was always 5,000 to 10,000 a year. I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, But in the “morality” of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics?’(p 197) The official figures of maternal death due to illegal abortion before abortion was legalised was 160. Dr Nathanson estimates the actual figure to be around 500 maternal deaths per year.
Notes:
[1] Dr Nathanson is quoted in John Powell, Abortion: the silent Holocaust. Tabor, Allen, Texas. 1981. p. 75ff
[2] Bernard Nathanson, Richard Ostling. Aborting America. Pinnacle Books. New York 1979.
[3] Bernard Nathanson. Deeper into Abortion. New England Journal of Medicine. 28 November 1974.