The Hand of God: A Journey from Death to Life

During the late 1970's Dr. Nathanson became an icon to the cultural anti-life forces in America, the subject of ridicule and satire in comic strips and news commentary, and the butt of jokes of television comedians for his change of heart and mind regarding the objective reality of abortion, the taking of innocent human life. Since then along with a distinguished obstetric medical practice and university teaching he has given hundreds of lectures throughout the world in defense of the unborn. Now upon the verge of retirement he has written his autobiography, which contains searing personal revelations about how a man could possibly become an abortionist, yet also a powerful witness to the possibilities of divine grace as he draws near to the final step of Baptism and incorporation into Christ's Church.

A warning to the reader: this is not an easy or pleasant book to read because it tells the truth about evil acts that are truly repugnant. What is remarkable and praiseworthy is that the doctor does not make excuses for his behaviour. The reader certainly has many reasons at least to understand without condoning his behaviour after reading about his childhood and adolescence in a familial setting that can truly be described as loveless. Nathanson recounts in painful detail his bringing up in New York by a family that appears to have been seriously dysfunctional for at least a couple of generations without the slightest semblance of religious faith or familial loyalty or affection.

The first chapter is entitled "The Monster," referring to his father, and spells out very clearly the young Nathanson's relationships with his Jewish Canadian physician father and his family. "We would take long walks together, he and I, and he would fill my ears with poisonous remarks and revanchist resolutions concerning my mother and her family and... I remained his weapon, his dummy, until I was almost seventeen years old, when l-as-he rebelled and told him I would no longer function as his robotic surrogate assassin." About his sister, "her mental health destroyed, her physical health intact but–to her befuddled mind–suspect, her children rebellious, fallen in with bad company and truant, my sister killed herself one sunny August morning with an overdose of a powerful sedative." Regarding himself, "And l? I have three failed marriages and have fathered a son who is sullen, suspicious but brilliant in computer science."

The secret of Christ's peace

Religion had no real role in his upbringing. His family was non- observant, although they did celebrate the Jewish holidays, perhaps as many putative Christians still observe in a certain sense Easter and Christmas, without these Christian solemnities having any real impact on their thought or behaviour. Quite striking is his description of his childhood concept of God. "My childhood image of God was, as I reflect on it six decades later, the brooding, majestic, full-bearded figure of Michelangelo's Moses. He sits slumped on what appears to be his throne, pondering my fate and at the brink of disgorging his inevitably damning judgment. This was my Jewish God: massive, leonine, and forbidding." This description fits in very well with the noted psychologist Paul Vitz's view that almost all serious atheists are the victims of abusive or absent fathers. One can see that Nathanson in describing his vision of God could well be describing his abusive father. At a later period in his life, during a stint in the Air Force, to while away the idle hours, he takes a Bible study and "discovered that the New Testament God was a loving, forgiving, incomparably cosseting figure in whom I would seek, and ultimately find, the forgiveness that I have pursued so hopelessly, for so long," thus presaging his eventual conversion to the Christian faith.

During his medical studies at McGill University in Canada he had as a professor the famous Jewish psychiatrist, emigre from Nazi Germany, Karl Stern. This relationship would have positive consequences decades later as Nathanson began to examine more closely the arguments for Christianity. He says about him: "Stern was the dominant figure in the department: a great teacher; a riveting, even eloquent lecturer in a language not his own and a brilliant contrarian spewing out original and daring ideas as reliably as Old Faithful. I conceived an epic case of hero-worship of Stern, read my psychiatry with the diligence of a biblical scholar, and in turn was awarded the prize in psychiatry at the end of my fourth year.... There was something indefinably serene and certain about him. I did not know then that in 1943, after years of contemplating, reading and analyzing, he had converted to Roman Catholicism." Later on, Nathanson read his famous autobiography The Pillar of Fire. It is then he realized that Stern "possessed a secret I had been searching for all my life, the secret of the peace of Christ."

Later chapters go on to relate a compulsive promiscuity, which results in his first encounter with an abortion, one performed on his first girlfriend and paid for by his father, the story of his first two marriages, and in what is perhaps the most shocking and chilling incident, an abortion performed by himself on another of the women with whom he had had affairs. "In the midsixties I impregnated a woman who loved me very much. She begged me to keep the pregnancy, to have our child. I already had two ruined marriages, both destroyed largely by my own selfish narcissism and inability to love. (I believe it was Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov who defined hell as the suffering of one unable to love and if this is true, I have served my sentence and then some....) I saw no practical way out of the situation, told her that I would not marry her and that I could not at that time afford to support a child (an egregious example of the coercion exercised by males in the abortion tragedy), and I not only demanded that she terminate the pregnancy as a condition of maintaining our relationship, but also cooly informed her that since I was one of the most skilled practitioners of the art, I myself would do the abortion. And I did." He goes on to explain the procedure and then says, in words that remind one of the famous Goya painting of Saturn devouring his children: "You pursue me: you ask if perhaps for a fleeting moment or so I experienced a flicker of regret, a microgram of remorse? No and no. And that, dear reader, is the mentality of the abortionist; another job well done, another demonstration of the moral neutrality of advanced technology in the hands of the amoral."

Witness of pro-lifers was decisive

In the subsequent chapters he recounts much of what has already been told in his earlier book Aborting America about his growing involvement in the fight for the liberalization of abortion laws in the United States, which of course culminated in the notorious decision in 1973 of Roe vs. Wade by the Supreme Court of the United States effectively providing for abortion on demand in the U.S. Over time Dr. Nathanson saw clearly the scientific evidence, due in great part to the new technology. It enabled him to see the child in the womb. What he had been aborting by the thousands (he estimates that he was involved directly or indirectly in over 75,000 abortions) was in fact a human being from the moment of conception. He stopped performing abortions and became the best known advocate and convert to the pro-life cause in the U.S.

In one of the final chapters of the book, entitled "To the Thanatoriums" he prophesies about what Pope Paul VI presaged so clearly in his Encyclical Humanae vitae, that once the respect for human life at its inception is lost the way will lead inevitably to euthanasia. "Drawing largely from my experience with a similar brand of pagan excess I predict that entrepreneurs will set up multiple small, discreet infirmaries for those who wish, have been talked into, coerced into, or medically deceived into death.... But that will only be the first phase. As the thanatoria flourish and expand into chains and franchised operations, the accountants will eventually assume command, slashing expenses and overheads as competition grows. The final streamlined, efficient, and economically flawless version of the thanatorium will resemble nothing so much as the assembly line factories that abortion clinics have become and–farther on down the slope–the ovens of Auschwitz."

However, he ends the book on a note of hope in Christ's mercy, forgiveness, and offer of salvation. As is often the case in a story of conversion, it is the prayers and personal example of so many of his pro-life friends and coworkers that over time melt down the resistance of a hardened atheistic sinner so that he can see that there might be room in God's heart even for the likes of him. Speaking of the witness of pro-lifers at a demonstration at an abortion clinic: "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. They prayed for the unborn babies, for the confused and pregnant women, and for the doctors and nurses in the clinic. They even prayed for the police and media who were covering the event. 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?" With respect to the confrontation between idealism and hardened cynicism, the description of such demonstrations could remind us of early accounts of the Christian martyrs in the Colosseum of Rome facing the lions.

Witnessing these pro-life demonstrators who were willing to go to jail and suffer bankruptcy for their belief made such a powerful impression on Nathanson that "for the first time in my entire adult life, I began seriously to entertain the notion of God, a God who problematically had led me through the proverbial circles of hell, only to show me the way to redemption and mercy through His Grace. The thought violated every eighteenth century certainty that I had cherished; it instantly converted my past into a vile bog of sin and evil; it indicted me and convicted me of high crimes against those who loved me, and against those whom I did not even know, and simultaneously–miraculously–it held out a shimmering sliver of hope to me, in the growing belief that Someone had died for my sins and my evil two millennia ago."

Along with the powerful witness to his heart of these sacrificial lovers, the prolifers willing to go to prison if necessary to stop the killing, Nathanson was also moved by the appeal to his intellect, through reading. "In my case, I was led to a searching review of the literature of conversion, including Karl Stern's PILLAR of Fire. I also read Malcolm Muggeridge, Walker Percy, Graham Greene, C.S. Lewis, Cardinal Newman and others. It was entirely in character for me that I would conduct a diligent review of literature before embarking on a mission as daunting and threatening as this searching for God."

Thus we leave Dr. Nathanson, a true 20th-century man, on the verge of his reception into the Catholic Church, ready to "cross the threshold of hope," leaving "the culture of death" behind forever.

First appeared in L'Osservatore Romano (English Edition) in the November 20, 1996, issue.