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Dr. Bernard N. Nathanson, who renounced his prominent support of legal abortion and became a pro-life crusader, died Feb. 21 at his home in Manhattan. He was 84.
His best-known pro-life effort was the narration he provided in the powerful and influential anti-abortion film “The Silent Scream.” He also became an active speaker and writer on pro-life issues after experiencing his change of heart on abortion in the 1970s.
In December 1996, he was received into the Catholic Church by Cardinal O’Connor in a ceremony at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, following an interior journey to Catholicism “at least since the late ‘80s,” he said at the time. Joan Andrews Bell, who spent more than a year in jail because of abortion clinic protests, was his godmother.
Archbishop Dolan was to offer the Funeral Mass on Monday, Feb. 28, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Dr. Nathanson was born into a Jewish family, and as an adult often described himself as a “Jewish atheist.” His baptism and reception into the Church was an emotional occasion, he said, telling CNY that Cardinal O’Connor provided welcome comic relief with his remark at the end of the ceremony: “There, now you’re as Catholic as I am.”
An obstetrician-gynecologist practicing in Manhattan, his activities for legal abortion began in 1969 when he helped found the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (now NARAL Pro-Choice America) and became its medical director.
When abortion was legalized in New York in 1970, he became the director of the Center for Reproductive Health, which he often said was the busiest abortion facility in the United States.
He later became uncomfortable with that role, writing in a 1974 article in The New England Journal of Medicine that he was “deeply troubled by my own increasing certainty that I had in fact presided over 60,000 deaths.”
He narrated and directed “The Silent Scream,” a 28-minute film depicting the abortion of a 12-week-old unborn baby, in 1984.
“We see the child’s mouth open in a silent scream,” he said as the ultrasound image showed the child attempting to move away from the surgical instruments. “This is the silent scream of a child threatened imminently with extinction.”
Jeanne Head, who represents the National Right to Life Committee at the United Nations in New York, said Dr. Nathanson “was probably one of the individuals most responsible for Roe v. Wade and, once he realized his error, he dedicated the rest of his life to reversing it.”
In his 1996 autobiography, “The Hand of God,” Dr. Nathanson wrote: “Abortion is now a monster so unimaginably gargantuan that even to think of stuffing it back into its cage ... is ludicrous beyond words. Yet that is our charge -- a herculean endeavor.”
Dr. Nathanson was born in Manhattan and followed in his father’s footsteps to become an obstetrician-gynecologist after studies at Cornell University and McGill University Medical College in Montreal.
In his autobiography, he acknowledged performing an illegal abortion of his own child when a girlfriend got pregnant in the 1960s. In all, he said he personally performed about 5,000 abortions, presided over 60,000 of them as director of the Manhattan clinic and instructed fellow doctors in performing 15,000 more.
Dr. Nathan’s first three marriages ended in divorced. He is survived by his wife Christine, whom he married in the Catholic Church shortly after his baptism. He also is survived by a son, Joseph, from an earlier marriage.
