One of those rare individuals who might have been called a true monster of the 20th century passed away a week or so ago, with the fairly good chance that by the time of his death he was what Catholics would call a saint.
If he was a saint, he was also one who had deliberately presided over, by his own estimates, the killing of approximately 75,000 innocent persons. Of these, he estimated, he had personally carried out the killing of around 7,000 or so of the victims. Worse, he had been the key engineer in spreading his genocidal practice to numerous countries around the globe, including Australia. All of his victims were children, two of them his own.
To meet Bernard Nathanson was a remarkable experience. He seemed so … normal. To meet him was to meet someone who had been an Adolf Eichmann, Hitler’s murderous architect of the Holocaust, or a Pol Pot, and to experience that individuals who have carried out what would normally be called evil actions can be just as apparently normal as any other person one might meet. To talk with him was as normal as talking to any other visiting tourist, an interesting person from another country, with the exception that this particular individual just happened to have something to say about the realities of killing people by the tens of thousands on the basis of extensive personal experience. Addressing a small gathering of perhaps 60 or so individuals in Melbourne in the early 1980s, he told his audience after they had commenced the dinner by praying grace quite clearly where, at that stage in his life, he stood.
While he and they shared a common commitment, he was in no way a religious individual, he respectfully, almost matter of factly, pointed out.
“I want you to understand this: that while I respect people who believe in God, and while we all share the same common commitment on this issue,” he told his listeners, “you must understand I am not religious in any sense of that word. I am an atheist. I believe in nothing that I can’t see or touch or measure.” Silence instantly enveloped the room as his listeners waited to see what came next. Whatever one might say about him, Dr Bernard Nathanson was a person who knew how to get an audience’s attention.
However, he went on to say, as an obstetrician and a scientist committed to the principles of objectivity and scientific truth he had come to the inescapable conclusion that an unborn child could be nothing other than a human person with all the inalienable rights of any other human being walking around on the surface of the earth. Scientifically, no other conclusion was possible. Bernard Nathanson’s talk that day in Melbourne was the account of a personal and philosophical epiphany journeying from darkness to truth that should have been heard by every person in that city and across this nation. Of course, it was already impossible. By that stage, Australia had come to embrace in its entirety the murderous creed of abortion on demand he had almost singlehandedly instituted approximately 20 years earlier when, with a handful of colleagues, he masterminded the push to legalise unlimited abortion in the US. By the time Bernard Nathanson had concluded that abortion really was the killing of a child and had come to realise the horror and extent of the monster he had created, affluent and increasingly corrupt societies such as Australia had become addicted to the killing of their children.
As the co-founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League and as an obstetrician he had a particular authority on the subject of abortion. He recalled how he and his colleagues deliberately lied about abortion death statistics to credulous journalists who never bothered to check the facts, elevating the figure from an estimated 200 to more than 10,000 annually. However, his journey to leading pro-life advocate primus inter pares also paved the way for others to follow and through the decades there has been a growing stream of doctors who have renounced their practice of abortion. There is no doubt that Dr Nathanson also inspired many young doctors to decide against ever practising it at all.
More than 40 years after Roe v Wade, the landmark US Supreme Court case legalising abortion throughout the United States, its legal-political fiction has become a template for societies everywhere, including Australia. By the time Bernard Nathanson MD was born into eternal life last week, it seemed few wanted to listen to the killer who had discovered the truth. In 1998, politicians of every party, including those who identified themselves as Catholics, legislated the unlimited killing of unborn children in Western Australia, officially codifying what had become unofficial normality. They did this despite the fact that by the time they did so each of them was in possession of a copy of Dr Nathanson’s autobiography setting out the truth he had discovered and embraced about the reality of abortion and who it kills.
However, the real Bernard Nathanson story is actually the account of why resistance to God’s love is useless. This is the most interesting, the most inspiring, the most important aspect of Bernard Nathanson’s life. In his autobiography, The Hand of God, he recounted his journey from abortion’s chief architect to spending the last decades of his life as the most credible pro-life voice in the world. It is really an account of an odyssey from monstrosity to humanity. To read it, including the very disturbing account of his childhood at the hands of a father who could only be described as a monster, is to read the most uplifting story of the power of God’s love in an individual’s life probably to have been published in the 20th century.
While Bernard Nathanson described himself as an atheist for some time after his coversion to the pro-Life cause, he was baptised a Catholic by Cardinal John O’Connor of New York at a private Mass with a group of friends in the mid-1990s. He also received Confirmation and First Communion from the Cardinal. With him was the Opus Dei priest Fr John McCloskey who had taught Dr Nathanson his faith in the lead up to his baptism. A recent obituary recalled Bernard Nathanson’s comments on his baptism. “I was in a real whirlpool of emotion, and then there was this healing, cooling water on me, and soft voices, and an inexpressible sense of peace. I had found a safe place.” In his life Bernard Nathanson journeyed further than most Catholics ever do, but we should all try to follow in his foosteps. He had more courage than most others, including many Catholic men and women and not a few of those who lead them. He probably blamed himself terribly for his sins, including the killing of his own children. “I am,” he once said, “one of those who helped usher in this barbaric age.” Was he a monster? Actually, he was a hero. Kind friends and gentle hearts, of the charity of your souls, pray for him. He will certainly return the favour.