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Dr. Bernard Nathanson speaking at the Cincinnati Catholic Men's Conference in 1999.
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Dr. Bernard Nathanson speaking at the Cincinnati Catholic Men's Conference in 1999.
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Dr. Bernard Nathanson speaking at the Cincinnati Catholic Men's Conference in 1999.
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Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a former abortion provider, converted to Catholicism after realizing the value of life. He had performed thousands of abortions and was a prominent advocate for pro-choice. However, witnessing pro-lifers praying for the unborn made him question his beliefs. He eventually became pro-life and dedicated his life to protecting life at all stages. He wrote a book called "The Hand of God" that chronicles his journey. Despite facing criticism from both sides, he continues to speak out against abortion. Dr. Bernard Nathanson has been a member of the medical profession for a long time, having graduated from Cornell University's pre-medical program in 1945 and McGill University's medical college four years later in 1949. This happens to be his golden anniversary of being in the medical profession. Congratulations, Doctor. He may have been in the medical profession for a long time, but I think it's fair to say he's a baby Catholic Christian, having converted to our faith just a few short years ago. And that walk of his is a compelling story, and I don't want to steal his thunder. But certainly, his conversion is even more dramatic when you consider the fact that he acknowledges himself that he presided over 75,000 abortions in his former life, and that actually helps set the framework for Roe v. Wade. But the good news is that our Lord Jesus Christ is merciful and forgiving, and Dr. Nathanson has come to understand that. He's now a beacon for the pro-life movement and can obviously speak with great passion and out of a unique perspective for the protection of life at all stages. He's written a wonderful book, The Hand of God, that chronicles his journey from death to life, and we have copies of that book for sale at the Catholic shop up on the plaza as well as at the bookstores. And Dr. Nathanson tells me he'll even autograph copies in the noon hour if you'd like to. Now, it was in 1989 that he had a significant experience that really altered the course of his life, and that was when he mingled among some pro-lifers. He was doing a magazine article on the morality of blockades like that, and he noticed that the pro-lifers were praying and praying, and they were praying, obviously, for others, the mothers, the unborn, and Dr. Nathanson was struck by that, that people would actually commit themselves like that, sacrifice themselves like that, to pray for others. Dr. Bernard Nathanson has rebuked his pro-abortion stand of the past, sought forgiveness of those great wrongs from our loving God, and now basks in the comfort of our faith. A man of great courage with a powerful message, let's give a warm Cincinnati welcome to Dr. Bernard Nathanson. Dr. Bernard Nathanson. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The beauty of this disease is that you get to meet new people every day, and you go to new places every day. Now, I'm going to talk to you largely on reflections concerning religious conversion. This is a, as most of you know, a sometimes painful, always intensely personal and private subject on which I rarely speak. But I think that if there are some among you who would profit by my experiences, then it's worth standing up here and talking about it. I might at times fumble a little for the appropriate words. The whole spiritual odyssey from atheist or from Jew to atheist to Roman Catholic is a difficult one. It is one many people have taken, but each in his own way. So I beg your forgiveness if I hesitate or stumble or sometimes simply fail for a moment. As is my custom, by the way, I am dedicating any of my remarks to the memory of Mother Teresa. I want very briefly to fill you in on my childhood. My father was a physician who had been trained up to the age of 18 to be a rabbi. And then he decided abruptly to leave the Jewish faith, became a physician. Those are not, by the way, synonymous. And thereafter was an unrelenting cynic about matters spiritual. He went through the motions of raising me as a Jewish boy. I was sent to Hebrew school three times a week and Jewish Sunday school once a week. And each time I would come home, he would ask me what I learned. I would recite the lessons I had been taught. And then he would laugh. He would openly scorn and deride everything I said. Well, of course, the result was that I became myself skeptical, unbelieving, hurt, disillusioned, and lost, alienated. I went through the motions of a bar mitzvah at the age of 13 and never again set foot into a Jewish synagogue in my life. And clearly became not an agnostic, but an atheist. You know, Chesterton once said about atheists that if there were no God, there'd be no atheists, which is probably true. Anyway, I proceeded through college and medical school, through the post-graduate years of training and residency, and became more and more outraged at what I perceived to be a social injustice. That was laws restricting abortion. And so, in 1968, I and three other people, Betty Friedan and Lawrence Lader and Carol Greiser, formed the first political action group for pro-choice or pro-abortion. And we called it NARAL, N-A-R-A-L, which is the National Abortion Rights Action League. They have simply, I believe since that time, added reproductive rights in there somewhere, and the acronym is now impossible. But at any rate, I became a worldwide spokesman for striking down all laws restricting abortion, not just in this country, but all over the world. And traveled extensively, spoke before legislatures, Congress, other governments on this subject. I was extremely public about it. And, much to our surprise, in two years, in New York State, we succeeded, we meaning the people in NARAL, succeeded in striking down a law prohibiting abortion. That law had stood on the books of New York State for 129 years, and we got rid of it within two years. Now, in order to implement the lack of a law, that is to say, there were then no governing laws in New York State, we knew that we had to open a clinic which would be available to women from at least the eastern half of the United States to have safe, inexpensive, humane abortions. Many of the things I say are oxymoronic here, but we'll forget that. So, to that end, I established the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health, or CRASH, which was a euphemism for the biggest abortion clinic in the world. We were situated in the belly of the beast, right in Manhattan, in the middle of Manhattan. I was the director. I had 35 doctors working for me, 85 nurses. We were doing 120 abortions every day, including Sunday, and we had 10 operating rooms. That's the size of a major hospital. And at the end of the two years that I was the director of that clinic, we had done approximately 60,000 or so abortions. I myself had supervised another 10,000 by residents in hospitals, and I had done about 5,000 with my own hands. So I have, or had, 675,000 abortions in my life. One of those abortions was unique in that my girlfriend at the time had become pregnant. She did not want an abortion. I insisted on it. And, of course, she finally relented, and I told her, well, the only person to do your abortion is the best abortionist around, and that's me. So I put her in hospital, and she was under anesthesia. I simply did the abortion as I would do anyone else's abortion, took off my gloves, washed my hands, that's that, and left. I had just killed my own child, and I had no more feelings about it than catching a subway to the Bronx. It was purely a technological exercise. I, in those years, was involved in acquisition in material matters. I went from that job to a job as director of obstetrics and gynecology at the Women's Hospital, which is part of Columbia University in New York City, and as chief of that service, I began to do a great deal of research with what were then new technologies, ultrasound and fetal heart monitoring and radio immunochemistry and a lot of other things. And at the end of four years of research on the human fetus, I finally had to accept that the gathering mounds of data, the accumulation of all of this scientific investigation, had left me with no other conclusion but that the human fetus was one of us, was a member of the human community, and could not be killed anymore. So I became openly pro-life, starting gingerly, but as several years went by, my views began to harden, and as most of you know by now, I have no exceptions in my objection to abortion. I don't believe there are any indications, medical or otherwise, for abortion. I believe that abortion is an unmitigated evil, and I have become public on this subject as I was public on the other side, and will continue to be that. You know, Mark Twain, speaking of doctors, once said, there are two distinguishing characteristics about physicians. One is ignorance, and the other is confidence, and that's the way we stand. At this point, I just want to bring to your attention that the medical community, when I was pushing abortion, had stopped speaking to me. It was too radical, it was too big a jump, it violated 150 or 200 years of the code of ethics of the medical profession. So I was a pariah, an outcast. However, after several years of legal abortion, when most doctors, most gynecologists at any rate, were doing abortions, then I became pro-life, the medical community stopped speaking to me again. So it was, you know, I think I remember a poll they took at that time, and I think I came out two points ahead of the Unabomber, but that's okay. At the clinic, by the way, the statistics I just quoted you are from the Marv Albert computer, a new computer we had in the clinic. It has 33 bytes and no memory. But, okay. So, looking back in the early 80s, I became exceedingly depressed. I had acquired everything, reputation, money, a huge practice, a lot of press and publicity, but it all meant nothing. And as I sank deeper into depression, I became suicidal. And through my head kept running the words of the poet Yeats and his poem, Sailing to Byzantium. The words went, consume my heart away, sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal that knows not what it is. Gather me into the artifice of eternity. I had tried all the anodynes, all the usual painkillers, you know, sex, alcohol, money, everything. Nothing had worked. But I met in my travels a young priest who I suppose saw something that no one else had seen, including me. And that was a certain salvageability, a spiritual salvageability. So, he began a conversation with me. Once a month or so, he would come up to my house and we would have a dialogue for two or three hours, mostly intellectual on works we had read, a little spiritual, certainly no pressure, no forces to conform to any church. But after five or six years, I'm a slow learner, I finally indicated to him that all that I had left was God and the church and I desired to be received into the Roman Catholic Church. And on the 9th of December of 1998, John Cardinal O'Connor and five other priests, I must have been a terminal case, it took six priests to get me in, but they baptized and confirmed me. And after the ceremony was over, Cardinal O'Connor walked up to me, we'd known each other for years, and he said, there, he said, now you're as Catholic as I am. Thank you. I was Catholic, but certainly not a cradle Catholic, and I did not know any of the mechanics of Catholicism. I mean, I didn't know how to make a confession or anything else because the priest and I had never really gone into this. So when I prepared to make my first confession, I emailed him in an emergency, most emergency manner, and said, look, I said, I don't know anything about, well, he said, don't worry about those things. He said, you know, we got you into the room now. The rest is all furniture. I thought, okay, but just give me some idea of how I go about this confession business. So he emailed me a long list of instructions and dialogue, and clutching that in my hot little fist, I went into my first confession, where to my horror, I found it was pitch black, and I couldn't read anything. So, anyway, I stumbled through it, and as I left, the priest was very patient, but as I left, I heard him mutter under his breath, what fool could have converted this man and taken him into the church when he knows nothing? How could I say John Cardinal O'Connor, a prince of the church? Well, anyway, I have been all over the world speaking on pro-life issues. I just, in fact, got back from Washington, D.C. You know, that's a city that has a unique niche in American history. It is the only city in which the mayor rode to his own inauguration in a limousine, the license plates of which he made. Not bad. Now, to illustrate for you how the hand of God moves, this is a book called The Pillar of Fire by Carl Stern. Some of you may be familiar with it. It is the story of his conversion from an Austrian Jew and psychoanalyst, and a brilliant one at that, to Catholic. The interesting thing is, the conjunction of events goes something like this. In 1949, in my last year at medical school, I was taking the course in psychiatry, and my professor was Dr. Stern. He and I struck up a friendship. In fact, he gave me the prize for that year in psychiatry, and even arranged a psychiatry residency for me, for me to become a psychiatrist. I said, no thanks, but that's another story. But I did not know that at that very moment, in that very year, that I was dialoguing with Dr. Stern, and being his student and apprentice, as it were, he was then undergoing conversion to Roman Catholicism. And I did not know that for another 20 years, until I picked up this book in a second-hand bookshop, and understood how the hand of God moves in such mysterious and Byzantine ways. But it surely moves. Stern had a long letter to his brother in this book, and in the letter he posed the question which everyone would ask him, how can you as a scientist, and this question has been asked of me, how can you as a scientist believe in such ethereal, esoteric, and unconfirmable matters as God, and the Trinity, and Incarnation, and all the rest? And his answer is worth reading. He said, I have never experienced any conflict between science and religion. Some time ago I read in a German history of philosophy that Pascal's early death was caused by the inner tortures he endured, resulting from the conflict between science and religion. It is quite possible that Pascal suffered inner conflicts, but there is no indication that that was one of them. And I presume that de Broglie is a Christian, and Max Planck, the great physicist, is a Christian. Pascal and Newton were Christians. It is possible that they were Christian besides being scientists, or on account of being scientists. But why should they have been Christians in spite of being scientists? And that is my stock answer to those things. I was struck by a quote from Francis Collins, a physician who heads up the Genome Project. This is a 15-year project mapping out all the genes, the 100,000 genes on all our chromosomes in each of our cells. It's an enormous project. It's been funded for $3 billion. It should be through by the year 2000. And Collins, the head of this entire project, said these words, When something new is revealed about the human genome, I experience a feeling of awe at the realization that humans now know something that only God knew before. Extraordinary. Well, why did I become a Roman Catholic? I did not become a Roman Catholic as I would become a member of the Town Point Club in Virginia. And in a column in one of the newspapers, a very well-known columnist said these words, One should understand that the Catholic Church is not a democracy. It claims the authority Jesus Christ bestowed on his 12 apostles. Christ enjoined them to teach, not to take polls, and certainly not to adapt his teaching to the contemporary world. The contemporary world, which is in every age hostile to prophetic truth, continues to be so. Trend analysis on Good Friday would probably show a poor prognosis for Christ's messages. I did not become a Roman Catholic to worship a harsh, sometimes unrelenting, vindictive God as one finds in the Old Testament. I am captivated by the love that permeates the New Testament, by the soft-edged, beautiful parables of Christ in his teaching, and of the message of mercy and forgiveness which Christ bore and disseminated into the world. When I think of the moral baggage that I had to carry into the next world without forgiveness, 75,000 unborn babies' blood, three failed marriages, one child emotionally disturbed, and on and on. It was simply more than the human spirit could bear without help. And so that is why I did join, why I was received into, why I desired with every fiber of my being the closeness of a relationship with Christ and God and the Holy Spirit. Carl Stern says in his book, you should live experimentally for one day, just one day, as if the Gospels were true. And I try to do that every day. So let me go to other reasons why I did join, or at least sought the refuge of the Roman Catholic Church. And by the way, I wrote a piece for a book called Why I Am Still a Catholic, which contains some of this material. And initially, the people who asked me to write the piece asked me before I was even received into the church. I said, wait a minute, don't get me about still a Catholic. I'm not even a Catholic now. And then about three weeks after I was received, they again called me and wanted me to write the piece. I said, wait a minute, I've been a Catholic three weeks. Give me a break here. But finally I wrote the piece, and I did include the rest of my reasons, one being a profound understanding of the church, of human nature and human society, and a sense of clarity and common sense pervading the teachings of the church. Then there was the uninventability of Jesus Christ. Clearly, either he was mad or he was divine. And we know he was not mad. I was attracted by the age and survivability of the church over the centuries, and its obvious trajectory into eternity. Infinite patience, which springs from its confidence rooted in its infinite endurability. The church has been there, is there, and will always be there. Thank you. Another reason is its universality. I have lived in many places and been all over the world, but the mass is the same everywhere. There is a certain sense of familiarity no matter where one is. The moment in the mass when we reach around and shake the hand of the people next to us, that bond, that simple but profoundly moving bonding, is what I so cherish. The mass for me is never long enough. I don't know about you, but I am always disappointed when the priest after the Eucharist says, the mass is over and go on your way. I feel somehow incomplete. I want more. I want to go there again tomorrow and the next day. I also cherish the idea of Mary. Sometimes talking to Christ may be difficult, but in my particular case, with my mother only a shadowy figure in my life, of no influence in my life, Mary is especially important to me as the mother of us all. And I take this personally. You know, Walker Percy, who was a physician, perhaps America's greatest novelist in the 20th century, and a Catholic convert at the age of 22, was a recluse, lived in Louisiana, in New Orleans, and was very short and sharp with his words, and always maintained that a smart mouth question deserves a smart mouth answer. And when he was asked, as he frequently was, why did you become a Catholic? His answer invariably was, what else is there? What else is there? I recognize, as many of you do, that those who administer the church and its works are not perfect human beings. But one wise man once remarked, search for the perfect church, if you will, and when you find it, find it. But know that on that day, it has become something less than perfect. Thank you. I want to close, and by the way, every speaker is allowed three finales and two in conclusions. I want to close with a short passage from a book by Malcolm Muggeridge, an Englishman who, like me, led a prolix life, a life of evil, and a profound disdain for conventional morality, until he was 79 when he joined the Catholic Church. By the way, the name of my piece in that book, the piece on why I'm still a Catholic, I called it A Safe Place on Joining the Catholic Church at the Two-Minute Warning. Well, Malcolm Muggeridge wrote a book called Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim, and it is remarkable for this passage. It has never been possible for me to persuade myself that the universe could have been created, and we homo sapiens, so-called, have generation after generation somehow made our appearance to sojourn briefly on our tiny earth solely in order to mount the interminable soap opera, with the same characters and situations endlessly recurring that we call history. It would be like building a great stadium for a display of tiddlywinks or a vast opera house for a harmonica recital. There must, in other words, be another reason for our existence and that of the universe other than just getting through the days of our lives as best we can. Some other destiny than merely using up such physical and intellectual and spiritual creativity as has been given to us. This, anyway, has been the strongly held conviction of the greatest artists, saints, philosophers, and until quite recent times, even scientists, through the Christian centuries. And they have all assumed that the New Testament promise of eternal life is valid and that the great drama of the incarnation which embodies it is indeed the master drama of our existence. To suppose that these distinguished believers were all credulous fools whose folly and credulity in holding such beliefs has now been finally exposed would seem to me untenable. And anyway, I would rather be wrong with Dante and Shakespeare and Milton, with Augustine of Hippo and Francis of Assisi, with Dr. Johnson and Blake and Dostoevsky than right with Voltaire and Rousseau and Darwin and the Huxleys, Herbert Spencer, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Senator Edward Kennedy, Dan Rather, and William Jefferson Clinton. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.
