{"id":11104,"date":"2011-02-21T14:05:19","date_gmt":"2011-02-21T19:05:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/?p=11104"},"modified":"2011-02-21T14:05:19","modified_gmt":"2011-02-21T19:05:19","slug":"rip-dr-bernard-n-nathanson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/2011\/02\/rip-dr-bernard-n-nathanson\/","title":{"rendered":"RIP, Dr. Bernard N. Nathanson"},"content":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK \u2014 Dr. Bernard N. Nathanson, an obstetrician who oversaw the performance of about 75,000 abortions before becoming a leading pro-life advocate and a convert to the Catholic faith, died after a prolonged battle with cancer this morning in New York. He was 84.<\/p>\n

After performing his last abortion in 1979 and declaring himself to be pro-life, Nathanson produced the 1985 film The Silent Scream, which shows sonogram images of a child in the womb shrinking from an abortionist\u2019s instruments, and the documentary film Eclipse of Reason, which displays and explains various abortion procedures in graphic detail. Both films had a significant impact on the abortion debate, solidified his credentials among pro-life advocates and earned him the scorn of his former pro-abortion friends and colleagues.<\/p>\n

He also published a number of influential books, including Aborting America, written in 1979 with Richard Ostling, then a religion reporter for Time magazine, in which he exposed the deceptive and dishonest beginnings of the pro-abortion movement and undermined the argument that abortion is safe for women.<\/p>\n

He often admitted that he and other abortion advocates in the 1960s lied about the number of women who died from illegal abortions at that time, inflating the figure from a few hundred to 10,000 to gain sympathy for their cause.<\/p>\n

In his 1996 autobiography The Hand of God, he told the story of his journey from pro-abortion to pro-life, saying that viewing images from the new ultrasound technology in the 1970s convinced him of the humanity of the unborn baby. Outlining the enormous challenge of restoring a pro-life ethic, he wrote, \u201cAbortion is now a monster so unimaginably gargantuan that even to think of stuffing it back into its cage \u2026 is ludicrous beyond words. Yet that is our charge \u2014 a herculean endeavor.\u201d<\/p>\n

He noted, regretfully, \u201cI am one of those who helped usher in this barbaric age.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This was a man who had performed an abortion on his own girlfriend, yet was still open to the truth which his medical research on abortion lead him to. He responded to grace and spent the rest of his life fighting what he had helped bring about.<\/p>\n

The rest of the article<\/a> goes into more details on his life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK \u2014 Dr. Bernard N. Nathanson, an obstetrician who oversaw the performance of about 75,000 abortions before becoming a leading pro-life advocate and a convert to the Catholic faith,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pro-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11104"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11105,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11104\/revisions\/11105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}