The Hand of God

I am currently reading a book called The Hand of God by Dr. Bernard Nathanson, and it is so brilliant I thought I would relate a few passages. The Hand of God is Dr. Nathanson's autobiography and the record of his involvement with the abortion rights scene in the USA. Over the course of his life Dr. Nathanson performed or presided over 60,000 abortions, including one of his own children. He was one of the founders of the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws (now the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League), otherwise known as NARAL. His book delivers a fascinating account of how he and his counterparts in NARAL and other organisations manipulated the political situation in America to rapidly overturn the existing abortion statutes in what he terms a 'political blitzkrieg'. Nathanson was the director of the Centre for Reproductive and Sexual Health, the largest abortion facility in the western world. Yet he changed his mind on abortion after seeing the unborn child on ultrasound, and in the last thirty years of his life he was a passionate pro-life advocate. One of his greatest contributions to the pro-life cause is the documentary The Silent Scream, which contains the ultrasound images of a 12-week old unborn child being aborted (most abortions happen between eight and eleven weeks). Nathanson relates the beginnings of the documentary with his typical raw honesty:

When ultrasound in the early 1970s confronted me with the sight of the embryo in the womb, I simply lost my faith in abortion on demand[...]

By 1984... I had begun to ask myself more questions about abortion: What actually goes on in an abortion? I had done many, but abortion is a blind procedure. The doctor does not see what he is doing. He puts an instrument into a uterus and he turns on a motor, and a suction machines [sic] goes on and something is vacuumed out; it ends up as a little pile of meat in a gauze bag. I wanted to know what happened, so in 1984 I said to a friend of mine, who was doing fifteen or maybe twenty abortions a day, "Look, do me a favour, Jay. Next Saturday, when you are doing all these abortions, put an ultrasound device on the mother and tape it for me."

He did, and when he looked at the tapes with me in an editing studio, he was so affected that he never did another abortion. I, though I had not done an abortion in five years, was shaken to the very roots of my soul by what I saw.[...]

[T]he response to the tape was so intense and dramatic that finally I was approached by a man named Don Smith, who wanted to make my tape into a film. I agreed that it would be a good idea. That is how The Silent Scream came about.[...] 

The Silent Scream depicts a twelve-week-old fetus being torn to pieces in utero by the combination of suction and crushing instrumentation by the abortionist. It was so powerful that pro-choicers trotted out their heaviest hitters to denounce the tape. They very cleverly deflected the impact of the film into an academic cul de sac: a dispute regarding whether the fetus feels pain during an abortion. [...]

Is someone who feels little or no pain (a patient under anesthesia, a cancer victim having undergone dorsal rhizotomy, or a chronic invalid on heavy analgesic medication) somehow diminished in the personhood sweepstakes?

You can watch The Silent Scream here.

Dr. Nathanson also recalls a moving encounter with pro-life demonstrators from Operation Rescue, a vocal pro-life organisation which stages protests at abortion facilities:

I attended an action by Operation Rescue against Planned Parenthood in New York City in 1989. I was planning an article to be published in an ethics journal on the moral and ethical aspects of such demonstrations: Were they legitimate protests or domestic terrorism--that is, the denial of constitutionally based rights to pregnant women?

The morning of the Rescue was bitterly cold. I joined the legion, approximately twelve hundred demonstrators, at their rendezvous in the west forties in Manhattan and proceeded with them by subway and foot to the clinic on Second Avenue and Twenty-first Street. They sat themselves down in rows in front of the clinic, effectively blocking entrances to and exits from the abortion clinic. They began to sing hymns softly, joining hands and swaying from the waist. I circulated on the periphery at first, observing the faces, interviewing some of the participants, making notes furiously. It was only then that I apprehended the exaltation, the pure love on the faces of that shivering mass of people, surrounded as they were by hundreds of New York City policemen.

They prayed, they supported and encouraged each other, they sang hymns of joy, and they constantly reminded each other of the absolute prohibition against violence. It was, I suppose, the sheer intensity of the love and prayer that astonished me: They prayed for the unborn babies, for the confused and frightened pregnant women, and for the doctors and nurses in the clinic. They even prayed for the police and the media who were covering the event. They prayed for each other but never for themselves. And I wondered: How can these people give of themselves for a constituency that is (and always will be) mute, invisible, and unable to thank them?

You can read Nathanson's testimony here.
You can buy The Hand of God, and Nathanson's other book, Aborting America, at Amazon.