Bernard Nathanson - The Hand of God: A Journey from Death to Life by the Abortion Doctor Who Changed His Mind

chapter i

The Monster

I did my last abortion in late 1978 orearly 1979. I was doing only a few abortions in those years, and those only forwhat I deemed compelling medical reasons. The years that have passed since Iroutinely performed abortions have been for me a remarkable odysseymedically,ethically, and finally spiritually. I will probably fumble through some of thewords when we get to the spiritual end of my journey.

Thisbook will be semi-autobiographical, using myself as a paradigm for the study ofthe systematic fission and demise of one system of morality, no matter howfragmented, fatuous, and odious, and the painful acquisition of another morecoherent, more reliable, and less atomistic one.

Thebackdrop will be the issue of abortion. I know the Holocaust well, havingstudied it intensively and having lost relatives to it. I also haveconventional knowledge of marxism and its bloody legacy But I know the abortion issue as perhaps no one elsedoes.

Iknow every facet of abortion. I was one of its accoucheurs ;I helped nurture the creature in its infancy by feeding it great draughts ofblood and money; I guided it through its adolescence as it grew fecklessly outof control It is said that if we grew at the same rate during our entiregestation as we do in the first two weeks of life we would each weigh twentyeight thousand pounds at birth. Abortion is now a monster so unimaginablygargantuan that even to think of stuffing it back into its cage (havingfattened on the bodies of thirty million humans) is ludicrous beyond words. Yetthat is our chargea herculean endeavor.

Atthe conclusion of many of my lectures, I am often taken aside and asked: Isn'tabortion at the root of all our problems? Hasn't the abortion mentalityinfiltrated our culture so extensively that it has contaminated every socialinstitution touching upon our lives: education, family, sex, politics, economics?And if abortion were to be recriminalized , would notour moribund society come bounding off its ventilator in robust good health?

Theanswers are no, yes, and no. The abortion mentality, for lack of a better word, has steadily metastasizedthroughout our society so subtly and so aggressively that even if it weremiraculously recriminalized it is extremely doubtfulif such allied plagues as child abuse, pornography, violence against women, andgenocide (I have my annual physical check-up scheduled with Dr. Kevorkian nextweek) would all magically vanish.

Welive in an age of fulsome nihilism; an age of death; an age in which, as authorWalker Percy (a fellow physician, a pathologist who specialized in autopsyingWestern civilization) argued, "compassion leads to the gas chamber,"or the abortion clinic, or the euthanist's office. Welive in an age of defining personhood upward so that fewer and fewer of us makethe cut, an age of virtual abjuring of moral values, so that we can treatpeople like objectsand, yes, abortion has helped us learn to do that; and anage of cracking the pillars of certaintychurches, schools, and politicalinstitutionsso that everything, including your life, my friend, is up fordiscussion... the methodical suffocation of authority and the hopelessbalkanization of normative ethics. How delightful and endless our choices!tokill, to die, to use until no longer useful, all without ever being judged,even by our selves. (Our what ?) It is as Alisdair MacIntyre so aptly put it: The barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have been governing us forsome time.

Iam one of those who helped usher in this barbaric age. I worked hard to makeabortion legal, affordable, and available on demand. In 1968, I was one of thethree founders of the National Abortion Rights Action League. I ran the largestabortion clinic in the United States, and as its director I oversaw tens ofthousands of abortions. I have performed thousands myself. How could this havehappened? How could I have done this? To understand, you must know somethingabout my father and his gods.

Inthe past I did not feel fully able to tell this story. In 1979, when Ipublished a semi-autobiographical book called Aborting America, my father, whom I loved deeply and loathedequally deeply, was still alive, and I suppressed many of my reminiscences,feelings, and memories in deference to my love, and my indebtedness to him. Butthis is 1996 (he died in 1990 at the Homeric age of ninety-four), and it istime to speak the whole truth: He was a formidable, dominant force in my lifeand in many ways forged theruthless, nihilistic pagan attitudes and beliefs that finally drove me tounleashwith a handful of co-conspiratorsthe abortion monster.

Myfather was a remarkable man. He was born in New York City in 1895 to animmigrant German-Jewish pharmacist and his devoted German-Jewish immigrantwife. He was the last of four children of that union. Like most recentimmigrants, the family lived in two rooms on the lower east side of Manhattan.My grandfather, the pharmacist, eked out a living helping the local apothecarywhile my grandmother took in sewing to supplement the bare-bones budget.

Whenmy father was one year old, the pharmacist was afflicted with tuberculosis, inthose days the most feared affliction imaginable, the AIDS of its time, and theextended family made a decision to send him to a sanitarium in Colorado. Theworking theory was that the pure fresh mountain air would sosoothe the afflicted lungs that healing could then begin. But it wasexpensive to maintain him there, even though a number of aunts and unclescontributed their pittance to his upkeep each month (they were all recentimmigrants and as impoverished as he). No social or medical safety nets then: Itwas work or starve . The pharmacist, who was notperceptibly improving at the sanitarium, somehow got word that his wife andchildren were in a state of near starvation, owing to the allocation of most ofthe available funds to his stay in Colorado; very shortly thereafter, he hangedhimself in his closet, the better to divert the funds into food for hischildren. To his last conscious day my father would weep each time he told methis pitiful tale; of my sister's suicide (she was my only sibling) at the ageof forty-nine he would not speak at all. She was divorced and had threechildren; no one ever divined a reason for her suicide. (In1979, I could write these lines with the detachment of a Camus character; now I twist with pain and pray for the anodyne of prayer.)

Thefamily then suffered a paralyzing fission: My grandmother was matched with awidower who lived in Ottawa, Canada. The widower was a shochut , the ritual slaughterer who would slaughter chickens and cows in the prescribedOld Testament manner so as to render them kosher. With five children of hisown, he made it clear to my grandmother that he could accept only one ofhersthe others would have to be placed with other members of the family, allof whom were as poor and laden with children as my grandmother, or placed inorphanages. A Sophie's Choice. She chose to bringlittle Joey, my father, then two years old, with her to Canada. The childrenleft behind did indeed go to orphanages. They were, in their individual ways,scarred for life. So was my father.