Dr. Bernard Nathanson

The following is a homily delivered by Fr. Dan Ruff, S.J., Director of Campus Ministry at Loyola College in Maryland. It is, without a doubt, the most powerful homily on Catholic social teachings regarding abortion that I have ever heard. It spoke to me on many levels, but ultimately it permeated my consciousness because, unlike so many other pro-life diatribes, Fr. Ruff was not asking us to renounce abortion policy outright. Rather, he planted a small seed of reflection that, at least for me, bloomed into a very profound affirmation of my views on the sanctity of life and the practice of abortion.

More importantly, he asked us to seek a larger understanding. To pursue the gift of God's Amazing Grace, which alone allows us to "sit serene and unafraid in a world of legal, physical, ethical, and moral chaos."

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Dr. Bernard Nathanson
A homily on John 9:1-41
Delivered by Daniel Ruff, S.J., Director, Loyola College Campus Ministry
March 18, 2007 at Alumni Memorial Chapel, Loyola College, Baltimore, Maryland


Bernard Nathanson is a medical doctor.

Today he is a Roman Catholic and a vigorous defender of life. Particularly of the unborn.

But it wasn’t always that way.

In 1968 Dr. Nathanson was one of the founders of NARAL—The National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws.

The campaign of his organization was instrumental in paving the way for Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion throughout the United States in 1973. In hindsight, Dr. Nathanson freely admits that he and his colleagues pursued a carefully crafted strategy to accomplish the legalization of abortion.

First, he says, they persuaded the media that the cause of permissive abortion was a liberal, enlightened, and sophisticated one. Knowing that true polls would reveal most Americans to be opposed to abortion, Nathanson and his allies fabricated and repeatedly cited the results of fictional polls. They claimed—falsely—that 60% of Americans were in favor of permissive abortion, and they repeated the claim often and loudly enough to persuade many to defect from what suddenly sounded like an unenlightened minority position.

Knowing that illegal abortions numbered at the time 100,000 a year, Nathanson and company repeatedly told the media that they numbered 1 million. They insisted that 10,000 women were dying from abortions annually, when they knew full well that the actual number was around 200 to 250.

The good doctor and his colleagues actually created many of the common slogans of the pro-choice movement:

Women must have control over their own bodies.

Safe and legal abortion is every woman’s right.

Who decides? You decide.

Freedom of Choice: A Basic American Right

Nathanson recalls, “I remember laughing when we made up those slogans. We were looking for some sexy, catchy slogans to catch the public opinion.”

They were very cynical slogans then, just as all of these slogans today are very cynical.

Nathanson also recalls that he and his confrères—interestingly enough they were all men—systematically vilified the Catholic Church and its socially backward ideas, targeting the hierarchy as the villain. More fabricated polls argued that, “most Catholics wanted abortion law reform;” that the Catholic people were enlightened and forward-looking and were being held back by their repressive leaders.

The unspoken assumption—also patently untrue—was that no non-Catholics were opposed to abortion. In fact then, as now, many other religions—both Christian and non-Christian—were unilaterally opposed to abortion. There were, and there even are now, pro-life atheists. But Nathanson and his company manipulated the media into focusing on the Catholic hierarchy, exclusively identifying them with the backward, pro-life, anti-abortion position.

Lastly, claims Dr. Nathanson, he and his colleagues systematically denigrated and suppressed any and all scientific evidence that life begins at conception. He notes that the typical pro-choice tactic is to assert that the definition of when life begins is impossible, and that the question is a moral, a theological, or a philosophical one, not a scientific one. Ironically then, it was his own involvement in fetology, when he became doctor of obstetrics at a large New York hospital and had to set up a prenatal research unit, that began to shatter his own pro-choice convictions.

Ironically again, this happened in 1973, the very same year that the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade and legalized abortion in America.

For Dr. Nathanson, the new technology of ultrasound began to reveal troubling evidence, for example the ability of a fetus to suck its thumb in the womb.

By this time, Nathanson had been a committed abortionist for nearly 30 years, having begun in 1945 when he persuaded a girlfriend to abort their child. He was now the director of the largest abortion clinic in New York, having personally performed 75,000 abortions, including that of one of his own children by another woman.

He recalls in hindsight, “There was never a shred of self-doubt, never a wavering of the supreme self-confidence that I was doing a major service to those who sought me out.”

Until, that is, those ultrasounds began to reveal fetuses behaving—well—like real babies.

Slowly the good doctor began to distance himself from the clinic and then eventually from abortions all together. He performed his last abortion in 1978 or 1979. And by 1984, he premiered The Silent Scream, a film which showed an ultrasound of a child being aborted to the surprise and the delight of pro-lifers, and to the chagrin of pro-choicers, who scrambled to repudiate their former hero and ally.

By this point Dr. Nathanson was taking stock of his life. He was estranged from his one son and he was working his way through a second, and eventually a third, marriage. Suffering from deep guilt and remorse over the many abortions he had performed, he tried therapy, self-help books, counseling and a variety of new-age spiritualities, without much success.

He claims that he was unable to find absolution within his own Jewish tradition, and he began to ponder the New Testament God as “a loving, forgiving, incomparably cosseting figure in whom I would seek, and ultimately find, the forgiveness I had pursued so hopelessly for so long.”

In 1987, he met a Princeton-based Catholic priest named Fr. John McCloskey, who became Nathanson’s spiritual and intellectual guide. Dr. Nathanson still struggled with insomnia related to despair and occasionally he pondered suicide—a route which had been followed by his grandmother and sister before him, and had been attempted by his father. But by January of 1989, he was researching an article on the morality of blockades at abortion clinics, which had him interviewing pro-life demonstrators and studying their faces. He already knew that many pro-lifers were praying for him—a fact which puzzled him, but also moved him.

It was at a demonstration on a cold January morning in 1989 when Nathanson witnessed 1,200 “Operation Rescue” demonstrators smiling and singing together, that a new breakthrough occurred for him.

“I apprehended,” he recalls, “the exultation. The pure love on the face of that shivering mass of people.”

He listened closely as they prayed for the unborn, for the women seeking abortions, for the doctors and nurses inside the clinic, for the police and the reporters.

“They prayed for each other, but never for themselves,” he writes, “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?”

“It was only then,” he adds, “that I began seriously to question what indescribable force generated them to this activity. Why too, was I there? What had led them to this time and place? Was it the same force that allowed them to sit serene and unafraid at the epicenter of legal, physical, ethical, and moral chaos?”

Dr. Nathanson now began, under the guidance of Fr. McCloskey, to read Christian authors like Walker Percy, Graham Greene, C.S. Lewis, and Cardinal Newman. He discovered that a former professor of his—a world-renowned psychoanalyst named Carl Stern—had converted from Orthodox Judaism to Roman Catholicism in 1943 and had chronicled his journey in a memoir. Nathanson also became fascinated with Luke the Evangelist, whom he admired as a physician and a historian. A year of study at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown led to Nathanson’s writing a new book: The Hand of God: A Journey from Death to Life by the Abortion Doctor Who Changed His Mind.

In 1996, Dr. Nathanson was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church, and he remains a vigorous pro-life advocate to the present.

It seems clear that Nathanson could identify with John Newton, the 18th century captain of a British slave ship who prayed for mercy during a violent storm at sea and felt rescued by amazing grace. Newton, who eventually became an Anglican priest and a vigorous opponent of slavery, immortalized his own conversion in the well-beloved hymn, “Amazing Grace.”

He wrote there about grace that taught his heart to fear, which brought him safe through dangers, toils, and snares.

Dr. Nathanson could probably say, as heartily as Newton, that he was amazed by grace that saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost, but now am found. Was blind, and now I see.

And that of course, my brothers and sisters, is the point of me sharing Dr. Nathanson’s story with you this evening.

Blind men and women who receive their sight from Jesus so still exist in our day and time, nearly two millennia after John wrote his gospel.

Sadly, there are still Pharisees as well—men and women utterly secure in what they know, convinced beyond any shadow of doubt that they see with utter clarity, even as they stumble blindly through their lives.

Recall Dr. Nathanson’s conviction before the doubts began to penetrate.

“There was never a shred of self-doubt, never a wavering of the supreme self-confidence that I was doing a major service to those who sought me out.”

The lesson for us, my brothers and sisters, is to remain open and humble. To follow instructions when we encounter Jesus in our lives. To reflect on our growth and our transformation and learn from it. To humbly confess our enduring blindness, and to embrace light when and where it comes to us.

We can be inspired by the example of Dr. Nathanson. But we can also be inspired by the example of our brothers and sisters here who are preparing for the sacraments of initiation.

All of us already have been washed in the pool and anointed by Jesus at our own baptisms, not with mud, but with oil. Already we are sent by our baptism, to reflect and proclaim the light of Christ in the world’s darkness.

With gratitude and humility, we tell our Good News: that grace has saved us wretches. That we once were blind, and that now we see.

Our confidence is not in ourselves, but in Jesus: the light of the world and the bread of life whose table we share. And so we strive, like the pro-life demonstrators who changed Dr. Nathanson’s heart, to pray for each other rather than for ourselves, to place our trust and our hope in that indescribable force: the gift of grace which allows us to sit serene and unafraid in a world of legal, physical, ethical, and moral chaos.

With confidence like the blind man, we kneel and worship before the Son of God, and we pray, “I do believe.”