Bernard Nathanson's High Tech Heresies
Becker, Brenda L.
BERNARD NATHANSON'S HIGH TECH HERESIES Playing at an Ethical Culture Society near you, in ultrasound. Until recently, the two armed camps in the abortion debate had, for me at least, one thing...
...Oh, come on, I press...
...These central-casting feminists are a predictable lot...
...And by the way, we don't use those forceps at a 12-week abortion...
...For Christ's sake, quit being amateurs about it...
...So, having been that vociferous on one side, I felt the least I could do as a public obligation was to be equally vociferous on the other...
...It will keep moving back, although not as fast as Nathanson says...
...But this is a living creature being stimulated...
...Then came Bernard Nathanson, M.D...
...And the pro-life movement's been regrettably stereotyped...
...Quiet and querulous, Nathanson hardly looks the part of a pariah...
...The pro-abortion crowd, with their doubletalk about the "contents of the uterus," all seemed to suffer bouts of ethical epilepsy...
...People tried to take away my hospital privileges, called me before a board of professional conduct...
...If this audience was not already convinced, it soon would be...
...The required facial expression is one of sardonic boredom, usually assumed while droning about how "exciting" something is...
...These fetuses are second, discrete patients whose hospital bed is a uterus...
...Nathanson seems to find the question a little silly...
...I Indeed, it was in 1974 that Nathanson sent his infamous letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, the one about 60,000 deaths...
...That "statistically insignificant fraction" of our million-plus abortions a year equals more than one a day...
...Nobody...
...On the brink of viability, baby-saving is an avocation pricier than collecting vintage Jaguars and considerably less glamorous...
...Of course, they are pretty smart...
...They're all dead...
...That's, what they've set their sights on...
...Finally, we go ahead without him, after being informed that the Blessed Sacrament has been reposed in the chapel...
...These are good people, they really are...
...maybe public relations is bullshit...
...I'll admit that at first I found myself being a little—disdainful, shall we say...
...The saline or whatever is injected, and then you leave...
...They deal with me largely the way the upper classes dealt with FDR—they considered him a traitor to his class...
...At first, the ultrasound image is hard to sort out...
...the child is being pulled in a downward direction, and the body is now being torn systematically from the head...
...The experience convinced me of one thing: The wretched debate is entering a new phase that will utterly flummox the media with its complexity, which is to say they will largely ignore it...
...I mention the clamor over Reagan's comment about the unborn feeling excruciating pain during abortion, a charge whose veracity has bogged down in endless arguments about the development of the cerebral cortex at eight weeks, twelve weeks, whatever...
...People are astonished that I could be involved with what the liberal press and the liberal medical establishment consider our reactionary elements—the Catholic Church, the fundamentalist Protestants, the Orthodox rabbis, and the rest...
...The scene looked like a Black Mass of medicine, savagely parodying the prostrate sacrifice of childbirth...
...We were taught that the unborn child was something in the uterus—but it was really an article of faith as to whether or not it was a human being...
...In-vitro fertilization—IVF, in jargon—has brought one boon to the pro-lifers: It has focused our attention on that DNA-packed droplet as the tangible first appearance of a couple's long-sought baby...
...the best we can hope for is a reversal of Roe v. Wade...
...His hospital colleagues, he says, "are "In the next five years, we will have the technology to move the pregnancy from the uterus at twelve to fourteen weeks and put it into another uterus, intact...
...Unfortunately, what we'll probably end up with is about forty-five states that legislate against abortion, and three or four states that will become abortion sanctuaries...
...Myself, I find there's one picture I can't get out of my mind...
...Nathanson shoots a don't-play-reporter-with-me look...
...Brenda L. Becker is a senior staff editor at a medical laboratory journal...
...You don't have to 'crush the head.' The head is very malleable, and it just sorta slides right out...
...Good thing, I guess...
...John's gets a standing ovation and much earnest fawning...
...Ah, yes, we nod...
...Are we finished?'" Next, we see Planned Parenthood's film, a bland collection of "experts" who offer unsubstantiated complaints about a number of technicalities...
...It is late...
...Nathanson and I kick these exhausting topics, and others, around for a while longer...
...Be Bernard Nathanson and 1 sit across a mahogany desk from each other in his unpretentiously posh office on the Upper East Side...
...But you've got to look into their hearts...
...As medical, advances like fetal surgery and in-vitro fertilization brought us deeper into ludicrous paradoxes (like saving preemies young enough to be aborted, and fighting for the legal rights of zygotes), they went on handing out their blurry broadsheets and marching around clinics...
...To wit: •To achieve a pregnancy, you need overkill—literally...
...I was wrong,' and crawl into a hole...
...I try to explain my frustration at the movement's crummy graphics and down-home spokesmen, who are arrayed (in New York, at least) against the best that Planned Parenthood can buy from Madison Avenue...
...I It is a raw night in late April, and I am sitting in a pew of St...
...the Reagan Administration has nixed it, and IVF biggies are chafing and feeling like Galileo...
...Even if he was a blatant media hound, as has been charged, there was some bizarre courage involved in ostracizing yourself so completely from all the best New York parties...
...It may not yet be cute and anthropomorphic, but the desperate couples in the IVF clinics will tell you: That's our kid in there...
...It is indeed true that Nathanson, a Joyce scholar and quintessential Manhattanite, has shown great willingness to rub elbows with busloads of grassrooters—a margin of whom are even loonier than that little old lady in Yonkers...
...Nathanson's arrival at St...
...Whispered cries of "There it is...
...As it moves toward the child, the child will rear away from it and undergo much more violent, agitated movements...
...It senses aggression in its sanctuary...
...I also wanted to see the film, if enly because the feminist establishment has howled it down as the most dangerous piece of propaganda since Triumph of the Will...
...He goes on to list the window-to-the-womb technologies "so discerning that the tiny valves of the heart can be studied as they snap open and shut...
...There is no intellectualization here...
...His desideratum, a constitutional amendment, will not happen, he says...
...Yes, I'm told that NARAL and NOW are mounting a campaign to bring out all their women who've had abortions," he chuckles, "which of course is morally and medically irrelevant...
...the National Right-to-Life Committee is right down there in Washington with their lobbyists, and they've knocked off a lot of pro-abortion legislators...
...The clips I've seen of Scream showed a fuzzy bob-bling form that could have been a fetus—or just about anything else...
...Fetuses, nothing...
...he told an AMA interviewer that one of these ashen survivors was his college girlfriend, to whom he lent $500 for an abortion in Montreal...
...Later, the snickering starts again as Nathanson says, "The abortionist and the anesthesiologist have a secret language between them, which shields them from the grisly reality of what is going on...
...It raises another interesting question-would we use this technology if it were available...
...First, let's move human identity backwards from birth...
...most would have excluded toddlers and anesthetized surgical patients from the ranks of the living...
...That's what happened to me between 1973 and 1977...
...We can see the child moving rather serenely in the uterus," Nathanson says...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1985 21 Five years...
...The last election was a virtual referendum on abortion, and it was a landslide victory...
...he is also astoundingly articulate and a shameless showman...
...This derogatory soundtrack ceases, in fact, at only two points...
...I've crisscrossed the country on this issue, and what we see here is so skewed by the press, it's appalling—and I detest that attitude...
...But I felt these things needed saying—and in the state of the art at that time, I was absolutely right...
...You'd think the rebuttal film would use the same technology I did—Nathanson's totally wrong...
...Well, you know, I broke ranks in 1969—much more radically than I have now, by the way...
...If you mean, was there a single point at which my apostasy became an epiphany, no...
...It is an image of utterly pure and sanitized violence...
...Sure enough, the fetal image contracts like a poked sea creature, clambering up the far side of the womb...
...We proceed to watch an abortion, and it's a stomach-turner...
...On paper, this looks like a reasonable compromise, until we recall just how elastic those standards tend to become...
...I first learned about Nathanson in an unlikely place: New York, the glossy weekly for would-be Yuppies...
...After receiving their zillionth red-rose lapel pins, he and his lovely wife head home to their Chelsea townhouse...
...Finally, we get back to the point where my fascination with this issue began—the medical laboratory, and the primal metaphysics of the test tube...
...The implications make you wonky if you stick to the credo that life begins at conception...
...To my relief, he agrees...
...The achievement of fertilization, the sweating-out of implantation in the uterine wall—all render ludicrous the pro-legalizer's medieval fogginess about what's "in there...
...Why, I ask, don't they at least find a decent PR agency...
...None tries to deny the stuff about the fetus being ripped apart...
...Clearly you're not familiar with what we used to do, and what they still do...
...He is impeccably clad in cream jacket and chocolate tie...
...Not, right now, on living embryos...
...And the narration nails the congregants to their pews...
...Enter the suction tip, a stark white rod at bottom screen...
...We talk about politics...
...In a second-trimester saline or prostaglandin abortion, doesn't one in effect deliver a stillborn fetus...
...Strong, and flawed...
...The nurse delivered all those babies...
...He tells us that abortion is not just a Catholic issue or he wouldn't be here, because he is an atheist...
...he advanced only to the currently fashionable soft-left position of "grieving a loss...
...Little makeup to be seen, but many work-boots and scrubby antique clothes...
...But the whole story has changed since the 1970s...
...Nathanson boasts correctly that he's moved the fight onto his turf...
...it's a bristling bunch...
...Was breaking ranks difficult...
...what follows shakes us up far more than any alleged micro-scream...
...Aside from the soft clacking of the projector, you could hear a holy card drop...
...The heart has speeded up...
...It's being done in veterinary medicine now...
...I squint hard: This so-called scream provoked the biggest outcry of charlatanism, and in this image as porous as coral, I admit I'm at a loss to discern it...
...The state...
...How can we present our victims...
...Without implying an overnight leap to a Mengele scenario, let's remember that scientific curiosity is a potent drug, and that history's lesson is that it winds up justifying too damn much...
...With admiration, I mention his refusal to hold his nose in the air, and he chews me out for elitism...
...the instrument shadow yanks and tugs...
...Now for the first time, we have the technology to see abortion from the victim's vantage point...
...most deceptive...
...The real number is probably much higher, since hospitals cover up these incidents in a frenzy of embarrassment and fear of litigation...
...First thing you know, you're face to face with what you're doing...
...The word "fetology" is a hoot, for reasons unclear...
...Maybe they're more realistic than we are...
...Their definitions of viability were even flimsier...
...she'd just wrap them up in a towel and send them to the pathology lab...
...The man intrigued me...
...Nathanson...
...Then I sat and talked to the man who's being glorified and vilified for the rather simple act of showing what an abortion looks like...
...Was there a certain incident that pushed him over the edge...
...Of course, that's going to bring up a whole group of other questions...
...The little convulsion is eerily purposeful—and unquestionably a response to an outside stimulus.The suction tip flashes across the grainy screen...
...I warm him up a little with the story about the head sliding right out...
...When I first helped organize NARAL, I was attacking things which were absolutely sacrosanct...
...The patients and the nurse have gone home for the day...
...Ponder some consequences: •In-utero surgery is now being performed on fetuses with hydrocephaly and urinary-tract problems...
...Nathanson, dapper and owlish, delivers it with laser-cool intensity...
...it is studded with lofty credentials...
...Then the snickers die: "They refer to the head of the child, which is now being sought, as 'number one.' And the anesthesiologist will inquire of the abortionist, 'Is number one out yet...
...The woman we took it from...
...Then the matter will be returned to the states, and the people will decide what they want...
...The crowd waiting patiently is about three-quarters female and middle-aged, with a smattering of Nice Young Couples in jeans and nylon windbreakers...
...Six talking heads...
...One is not there...
...If they think they're going to see the fetus slide down the suction tube smiling and waving as it goes into the bloody sponge, they'll have a monumental surprise...
...Now he's rolling, stabbing a pencil irritably at a prescription pad...
...the other siblings-to-be are lost...
...Somehow, it strains even a pro-life moral framework to contemplate crippling this astonishing technology —which has ended heartbreak for hundreds and will do so for thousands— to prevent the "murder" of hours-old cell clusters...
...I t seems that the key message to be learned from Nathanson—or, perhaps more accurately, from the furor over Nathanson—is that personhood is closing in on the fetus from both ends of an unbroken continuum...
...I didn't have any dazzling vision on the road to Damascus...
...Now all we see remaining," says the voice-over, "are the shards, the pieces of tissue, that document that there was once a living, defenseless, tiny human being here...
...But as minutes elapse, the pulsing contours become easier to identify, and it's sort of elating...
...The folk group regales us with an atrocious pro-life song of their own composing...
...According to a Centers for Disease Control official quoted in the Philadelphia Inquirer, some 400 to 500 late abortions a year produce the most dreaded complication of all—live birth...
...It is hustled away, but its shrieks still filter through the narration, and there is much shuffling and throat-clearing...
...IVF has saddled us with another, more urgent dilemma: To perfect this technique, like any other, scientists need to tinker...
...He hands me the letterhead of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists...
...Our wizardry here is accelerating even faster than in the neonatal phase...
...a reasonable definition of "salvage-ability" has crept from twenty-eight weeks' gestation to twenty-four weeks' just since that quaintly obsolescent pronouncement, Roe v. Wade...
...very, very upset with me...
...Yes, I say, but you performed abortions...
...Doesn't it weaken your case, I ask, to imply an emotional response in an embryo...
...you were aware of what a fetus looked like at every stage of development...
...Yet the article wound up as a near-tribute to the renegade obstetrician who has almost singlehandedly thrown the left into a defensive frenzy with his videotaped ultrasound scan of an actual abortion, The Silent Scream...
...He is initially cagey...
...Nathanson roots around for a copy of one of his seldom-reviewed books to give me, and courteously shows me to the door and the limo-filled Park Avenue night...
...are left to expire quietly...
...Here is what looks like a very tired Jewish doctor inching past middle age...
...We'll be able to speed up pregnancy...
...As the film progresses, a tide of nervous, derisive giggling ripples through the room...
...The prospective adoptive parents...
...That's America...
...what follows is strong stuff...
...not the babies in bottles, not even the unnerving grappling on the ultrasound, but a brief shot of that woman lying in stirrups, her body jiggling as the suction machine chugs between her legs as insistently as a Roto-Rooter...
...It's just a job, and you don't want to know about it...
...instead of nine months, how about three weeks...
...Here, on a large screen, the images gain startlingly in clarity and impact...
...If you poke it with a sharp object, it will try to get away...
...I just became more and more uncomfortable with it...
...I had no idea what we were working with then...
...But IVF has brought its own tangled woes...
...Through ultrasound, we are going to watch a child being torn apart, dismembered, disarticulated, crushed, and destroyed by the unfeeling steel instruments of the abortionist...
...The taxpayers...
...Elsewhere, Nathanson has described his discreet referrals to doctors in Puerto Rico for his affluent patients, his encounters with weeping septicemia victims in the E.R...
...He presses on with a clinical description of dilation and curettage, holding tenaculum and dilators aloft disdainfully for the camera...
...But as our life-support systems get fancier, and we can save these usually brain-damaged mites even sooner, who pays for and takes custody of them...
...Those technologies have convinced us that beyond question the unborn child is simply another member of the human community, indistinguishable in every way from any of us...
...1 he next time I see Scream, the scene has changed to the gentrified brown-stone neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn...
...the 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1985 "megapress" is his Moby Dick...
...punctuate the dark...
...The denial mechanism was much more effective in those days, because you couldn't see this child in there, moving, breathing, doing all the things every other baby does...
...This will of course defuse the whole abortion issue...
...Until recently, the two armed camps in the abortion debate had, for me at least, one thing in common: Both had upon numerous occasions insulted my intelligence...
...Really, I've been saying this till I'm blue in the face...
...In the New York article, a former colleague of mine, who didn't question my sincerity, said, 'How can he be associating with those people...
...Few of these thoughtful docs make the evening news, however...
...nothing, not even the hacking of a saw through diseased bone, could seem so antithetical to the concept of healing, to the ancient dictate of primum non nocere...
...feel free to laugh," sneers our young moderator...
...I don't walk around with an insufferable burden of guilt...
...The alleged science shown in this film is laughable...
...in this setting, they also seem peculiarly appropriate...
...In a curious parallel, Nat Hentoff—another pro-life heretic from that curia of liberalism, the Village Voice—has begged his cohorts on the left to "think of the fetus as a baby seal...
...All the weak spots I noticed subliminally in the first showing—the somewhat sappy music, the soft-focus shots of sad post-abortion women who look like feminine-freshness commer-;ial actresses, an absurd allegation of a link between the Mob and the abortion industry—are greeted with contemptuous snorts...
...If the fetus somehow survived the ordeal, it wouldn't sit down and write a book about it years later...
...You know, you've asked how the abortion issue will be solved politically, but not how it will be solved technologically...
...Freeze frame: "Once again, we see the child's mouth wide open in a silent scream...
...Their profile article had obviously begun as a routine hatchet job on the Right-to-Life movement's most prized convert —a man who decided, after helping to found the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) in the sixties, and supervising the biggest abortion mill in the country, that he had, in his own words, "presided over 60,000 deaths...
...At that point, however, he didn't advocate re-criminalizing abortion...
...As many concepti as possible must be harvested and implanted to improve the odds, sometimes even enough to freeze for later tries...
...The less radical among them have suggested an experimentation cutoff of fourteen days after conception—with the medical community, of course, monitoring its own adherence to its own chaste standards...
...still no Dr...
...the suave and outrageous pundit, suffering jetlag from a European tour with the video in tow, rubs watery eyes and puts his feet up on his desk...
...No I wasn't...
...There will be no cause for killing then...
...In the next five years, we will have the technology to move the pregnancy from the uterus at twelve or fourteen weeks and put it into another uterus, intact, or into a life support system where it will mature...
...The mother, who entered the facility to destroy the fetus...
...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1985...
...later, he deftly fends off a daft little old lady who harangues him for neglecting to mention that "abortion is an attack on the life of almighty God...
...I saw the film twice—once at a pro-life rally and once in a nest of pro-choicers...
...He's late...
...John the Baptist Church in Yonkers, New York...
...One embryo is lucky to make it...
...We start out on an objective note...
...It's not here on Park and 79th Street, it's out there in the middle...
...If you stroke a ten-week-old fetus around the lips, it will try to suck...
...It wasn't enough to say, The TV-movie scriptwriter in me tries again: How does he live with the thought of those 60,000 lives...
...Visionary, yes—but so was ultrasound thirty-five years ago...
...Now let's consider personhood at the very dawn of pregnancy...
...to view the loathed film and screen a Planned Parenthood rebuttal...
...Sickened groans...
...I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race...
...On what...
...It looked like—rape...
...He shrugs, relishing the role of provocateur...
...And it will make the old picket lines and shouting matches, the coat hangers versus the crucified baby dolls, look like child's play...
...Nathanson looks haughty...
...If we have fetal transplants and life support systems, whom does the baby belong to if it's put on one...
...here's our film.' Of course, all the movies made of it are repulsive...
...Vicki, who nobly assures us that she just loves to deliver babies, proceeds to tear that old film to bits...
...Notice how he uses large terms to set himself up as an expert," she says...
...As I leave, I notice a quotation framed on the wall from his beloved Joyce: "Welcome O Life...
...This hyperbolic sticking point is maddeningly superfluous...
...Right-to-Life groups...
...Have you seen the rebuttal film...
...Finally the free-floating head, a pathetic wandering golf ball on a gray sand trap, is extracted by forceps...
...I only said, this is a set of primitive responses to pain...
...When I was a medical student in 1949," he intones, "we had no such science as fetology...
...On another floor of the same hospital, they could be aborted on demand...
...And you do not come back...
...Private insurers...
...Look," he says impatiently, "I don't deny that I knew what a fetus looked like...
...And none of us, on either side of the issue, is quite ready for what that will mean...
...The ladies of the Brooklyn Pro-Choice Network have gathered in the basement of the Ethical Culture Society (where else...
...But as science developed," he continues, "I was totally wrong...
...As we watch the fetus squirm at the instrument's touch, a stout granola-fed baby in a Snugli sets up a howl...
...As the lights go up, these parishioners seem ready to run out and give their life savings to the cause...
...a few are placed on fancy life-support systems until they die in a few hours or days...
...It's happening...
...But under political inspiration, you invoke an enormous mechanism of denial—a machine 500 feet high and made of lead...
...Technology has thrown an ammo dump in the movement's lap, yet their image is defined by Bible-Belters and clinic-bombers...
...And the pro-lifers I'd encountered were grass-roots enthusiasts who appeared content to wallow in sentiment...
...You know, my wife suggested that we show an abortion being performed on a dog—except that we'd have the animal-rights activists bombing the stage...
...Our live rebuttal speaker is a local ob/gyn named Vicki Alexander...
...The Silent Scream is on tonight's agenda of the parish pro-life committee, along THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1985 19 with a live appearance by its narrator, Bernard Nathanson...
...These words have always struck me as both bombastic and irresistible...
...think of hare-brained Golden-Fleece-Award "studies" with mangled kittens and chimps festooned with electrodes, all to prove that pain hurts or smoking is bad for you...
...As a rule, the "live-born fetuses" (is it okay to call them babies now...
...But when you start working with these ultrasounds, your mechanism of denial starts to fissure and crack...
...But he is now a detested exile from much of the medical establishment...
...the argument for life starting at implantation looks better and better...
...parents and doctors essentially declare them person or non-person on an ad-hoc basis, depending on how badly the birth is desired...
...I had yet to meet one who could define for me the exact moment or physiological change that turned "reproductive choice" into infanticide...
...And his voice goes up and down...
Vol. 18 • October 1985 • No. 10
