Aborting America

...Thomus Powers A GREAT MANY lessons can be drawn from the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the one which has received the least attention is the implication we may not know the final crisis has even begun until the fast bomb goes off...

...Only a vague uneasiness obtained...

...Once doubt entered his mind, he says, he re-weighed some of his past reading (not much of it is cited...

...And more basically: In the conditions of this economy and this culture, conditions not likely to change much in this century, some pregnancies that do not threaten health are genuinely catastrophic, and by far the greater share of the burden of catastrophe is borne by women...

...Too confident in common sense...

...In an earlier chapter he suggests an answer when he reports the availability of do-ityourself pregnancy tests and abortion methods--for example, the use of prostaglandin vaginal suppositories early in pregnancy to initiate a process that will be indistinguishable from spontaneous abortion, so that the woman can be treated by her doctor without risk for either even if abortion becomes illegal again...

...Nathanson's first serious personal encounter with abortion and abortion law occurred in his third year at McGill Uni- t versity Medical College in Montreal, when his partner in a love affair became pregnant...

...Nathan needs her as his "unassailable advocate" against Newark's' 'charges.of defection and betrayal and reckless, heinous informing," his "unchaUengeable answer to their questionnaire that I proposed to offer the Wapters...

...Research findings, many of them admirably described in this book, keep confirming the uniqueness of each "product of conception," and such data are being gathered at earlier and earlier stages...

...A political crisis usually announces the onset of hostilities...

...he declares...

...the reforms aren't happening...

...He also opened himself to the new data in fetal research and to developments in perinatology, the new specialty devoted to treatment of the fetus...

...In a paper he contributed to the New England Journal of Medicine in 1972, he described with some pride the standards and procedures used by the clinic to establish its record of safe operation...

...So it must be...

...For an ad hominem reason, I wish, per impossibile, that it had been written by a woman, or by a man less impatient with "emotion...

...More importantly, I wish its author had contented himself with diagnosis and description of our problem, making us more aware of the life within the womb, and had resisted the temptation to offer a societal remedy...

...A New York City obstetrician-gynecologist, he took part in 1969 in founding the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), now the National Abortion Rights Action League...

...In any case, against the Wapters nothing avails: the fiction he has composed as his unchaUengeable answer, by desanctifying the "Child Martyr," "would seem to them a desecration even more vile than the one they had read...

...obtained proof that the Soviets were putting nuclear missiles into Cuba, despite many denials, For six days Kennedy and his advisers debated what to do, and on October 22 the President announced a blockade of Cuba along with other measures...

...In it he acknowledged that he was "deeply troubled by my own increasing certainty that I . . . presided over 60,000 deaths" ABORTINg ANERICA Bernard N. Nathanson, M.D., with Richard N. Ostllng Doubleday, $10, 320 pp...

...What hurt them and society most was, rather, their strategy of going for total victory in the courts, using a dubious constitutional rationale...

...Granting the first point with some reservations and Commonweal: 632agreeing with the second, I suggest that a successful hardline fight to restore restrictive laws will not overcome, will more likely nourish the abortion ethic where it has taken root...

...he was medically responsible for some 75,000 abortions, of which he performed 1,500 himself...

...For the rest of us The Ghost Writer will serve in a cruelly flawed world as the only possible answer: a novel about the nature and risks--and limits--of art and the imagination, about the surprising uses of adversity, as subtle, intricate, serious, finely-turned and deeply felt a fiction as Roth, in full voice, has wrought...

...Nathanson predicts new such discoveries as research continues...

...Sound morality and sound law must take account of what people feel and are able to perceive...

...Lonoff--not Roth's Lonoff but Nathan's, the character in his Anne Frank fantasies--knows that the girl of Nathan's dream is mad...

...After New YorkState, partly at NARAL's urging, legalized abortion in 1970, Nathanson served for nine~'een months as director of the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health, which despite its name was "the first--and largest--abortion clinic in the Western world...

...Step by step Nathanson became more strongly committed and more deeply engaged, until he became a significant pro-abortion force within medicine and a key figure in NARAL...

...But the Cuban Missile Crisis might have gone the other way...

...Nathanson is less impressive, at least to me, in discussing what is to be done...

...Lischer shows how, in spite of the obvious antagonism of their basic philosophical and religious positions, the common concern of Marx and Teilhard with the predicament and destiny of mankind makes their comparison and contrast highly illuminating in our contemporary situation:' --E.L Mascall, University of London $6.95 paperhack THE UTOPIA OF POPE JOHN XXlll Giancado Zizola "The Utopia of Pope John is a fascinating account of the most important five years of the papacy since the CounterReformation...

...At about the time Nathanson began to believe the laws should be changed, he met Lawrence Lader, a well-off, left-ofcenter magazine writer and crusader for social justice who had adopted total abolition of abortion laws as his cause...

...Any clever schoolboy knows this...

...There is a passage in an essay by Robert Jay Lifton which analyzes conversions of militant Communists into militantly anti-Communist Catholics...

...Short of the lies they solicit, the warm, comforting bedtime stories, there is no way of "answering" the Wapters that will not incur their wrath...

...Though he distances himself respectfully from the influence of traditional religion and scornfully from the Right to Life movement (which he stereotypes), what he wants is very close to what they want, a restoration of the status quo ante 1973...

...I know what they are required to do in the light of their history and their posture around the world...

...Yet the two became close allies in organizing NARAL and orienting it toward revolutionary rather than moderate change...

...The 20,000 Russians sent to establish, maintain and guard the missiles would have experienced many casualties...

...He is sufficiently politically aware to fear the possible consequences of a Constitutional Convention...

...But a reasonably diligent reader of the newspaper traditionally had no cause to complain...

...An illegal abortionist was found but the operation was very nearly botched and the trauma of the experience broke up the affair...

...So also is the author's dissection of the Supreme Court's decisions of 1973 invalidating state abortion laws...

...This is a compellingly interesting book that will suoceed in making any reasonably open-minded reader think hard about what abortion is...

...There is time for a run on food stores, wild confusion on the bourses, long analyticaJ articles on why things must go this way or that, kisses goodbye as the soldiers ~o off to mobilize...

...his hope is for a Supreme Court reversal of the '73 decisions, followed by enactment of state laws forbidding abortion except to prevent the death of the woman or a significant shortening of her life span...

...Someone asked him, 'If we do that, what do you think the Soviet Union will do?' He said, 'I think I know the Soviet Union well...

...For some time after this, he writes, he continued to perform abortions, including elective abortions, but with increasing reluctance, and he kept up his reflections...

...During the first few days the advisers leaned in favor of a"surgical" air strike to destroy the missile sites...

...Another factor appears to have been the infighting among proabortionists, the deceptive propaganda, false statistics and dubious arguments (as he now perceives them) used by some in his own camp...

...The decisions stirred up a backlash that threatens not only to overwhelm the pro-abortion movement but to keep putting reactionary single-issue candidates into office, with ethical consequences that Lader, Moody, Nathanson and most readers of Commonweal will deplore...

...It does seem fair to recall that the worst mistake NARAL & Co...

...But nobody 9 ever claimed that art was painless--how is one to broadcast that truism in Newark, or announce that the only truly unpardonable sin is bad art, the gratuitous infliction of pain...

...Penalties for violations would be imposed on the woman as well as the doctor and (one gathers) they would be severe...

...But the actual Amy Bellette, indifferent to and rather bored by Nathan, ~'emai-nS-s-tblidly herself and no one else...

...Nathanson explains the results of the process, i.e., his new convictions, better than he does the process himself...

...Here is the storyof what One old man did in less than five years to make peace by refusing to acquiesce in a permanently frozen east-west cold war, to reform the Church, and to mobilize the whole Church to work and pray on behalf of the poor and the exploited all over the wodd...

...Poor women who out of desperation induced their own abortions or found a hack :ibortionist risked disease, sterility and death...

...Sheer volume may have been a factor...

...Eugene Carson Blake, former General Secretary, World Council of Churches $9.95 paperback 9 November 1979:633...

...More specifically: If Dr...

...Nevertheless, so far as I could observe, the argument is made with careful fairness, and it is cumulatively powerful...

...Nathan, raging at the Wapters, tells his frantic, tearful-mother that no, he'll see them inhell before replying to them...

...This is a possibility which runs counter to the history of warfare...

...In internship and residency and later as he became successful in his practice, he learned (too well, he might say now) of the "tragic wastefulness, infuriating injustice and medical hypocrisy" of the abortion problem under proscriptive law...

...Michael Mandelbaum quotes him in his new book, The Nuclear Question: "I will always remember Dean Acheson coming into our meeting and saying that he felt we should knock out' Soviet missiles in Cuba by an air strike...

...But one suspects that such methods will be truly available only to the literate and well-informed, not to the women whose suffering made life difficult for Bernard Nathanson as a resident...

...Eventually the approach was scrapped because of the danger it would force Khrushchev's hand, and lead to War...

...Even those ethicists who agree with his conclusion may find unbridged chasms in the philosophical path he follows...

...Nathanson into the pro-abortion movement...

...Nathanson's prescription is followed, what is to prevent a recurrence of the conditions that first drove a younger Dr...

...the reader is able to think with him but not feel with him...

...That is a social reality with ethical consequences that ought to be integrated into moral judgment, not simply overridden...

...Nathanson describes Lader as a "male chauvinist feminist" and says he was put off by Lader's willingness, for the sake of polemical effectiveness, to cast the Catholic hierarchy as chief villain in the abortion problem...

...Books: BACKING AWAY FROM ABORTION M OST PEOPLE interested in the abortion debate will' have heard of Bernard N. Nathanson...

...Affluent women, tor whom pregnancy might be no more than an inconvenience, could expect cooperation from the profession in the "form of cooked lab reports, routine discoveries of psychiatric "indications" or referral to other jurisdictions (Japan, England, Puerto Rico) where abortion law was either permissive or loosely enforced...

...the Anne Frank he has fashioned, looking back twenty years after the events of the novel, resists all his strenuous efforts to "lift her out of her sacred book and make her a character in this life...

...This book is the result of his pondering...

...War in the modern age is so fearful there is always a ghastly shock when it actually begins, even if its approach has been obvious for years, as it was during the 1930s...

...Logic does not always suffice...

...made was not their tactical use of slanderous propaganda or even their insistent trivialization of what occurs in the abortion "procedure...

...Why did he change...

...tells her that Newark is not yet Belsen--in Newark the only violence committed on Jews is at the hands of plastic surgeons specializing in noses...

...During those six days rumors began to filter through Washington that something was up, but journalists failed to discover what it was and there was certainly nothing like open public alarm...

...What typically occurs in such cases, Lifton says, is not a 100-percent shift in the personality hut a one percent change coupled with a 180-degree reversal of direction...

...Theodore Sorensen, one of Kennedy's chief aides, described these deliberations at length for the Kennedy Library's oral history...

...and with high moral seriousness: trivial and vulgar people, too, feel real pain, run real blood...

...something that wouldn't be necessary if the fetus were merely "part of the woman's body...

...Pregnancies resulting from rape, incest, adultery or in which the fetus is known to be defective would not meet his test: "a life for a life...

...The problems rise in his final chapter, "Ought There Be a Law...

...The fighting does not generally start bang...

...And yet, the Wapters must be answered...

...The implied comparison with Nathanson is somewhat invidious, since it does not appear from his account that he was ever a true fanatic...

...But not quite: it is not for the deified Lonoff that Nathan creates Anne Frank out of baser materials...

...Both they and the Supreme Court misread public opinion...

...and as for his "father's love," the ultimate weapon invoked by the desperate mother, well, then, so be it: "I am on my own...

...THE NUCLEAR QUESTION Michael M/ndelbaum Cambridge, $16.95, 277 pp...

...Nathanson might reply, logically enough, that the injustice borne by some women is less than the one imposed on an aborted fetus, and that a permissive or neutral official stance encourages the choice of abortion for the flimsiest, most selfish and anti-social reasons...

...The only thing they had in common with real surgery, was blood...

...Once more he makes a single-factor analysis of a complicated moral dilemma, and once again he forces the results of opinion polling into a too-simple reading of the public mind...

...During that period, it will be remembered, Kennedy's advisers met daily to argue possible courses of action...

...The crisis began on October 16, 1962, when the U.S...

...That is the essential fast step toward making us do what must be done to make abortion never appear necessary...

...Another influence, described by Nathanson as "the 9 November 1979:631most imprerssive figure of my years in the abortion movement," was Howard Moody, senior minister of Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, a veteran crusader for liberal-to-radical causes and the organizer of the Clergy Consultation [read: Referral] Service on Abortion...

...The reality is not canceled out by Nathanson's observation that the underlying social injustice could be removed by social reforms...

...I think they will knock out our missiles in Turkey.' And then the question came again, 'Well, what do we do?' 'Well,' he said, 'I believe under our NATO treaty with which I was associated, we would be required to MARX AND TEILHARD Two Ways to a New Humanity Richard I.ischer 'Richard Lischer has given Marx and Teilhard the skilled, attentive, penetrating reading which serious thinkers deserve:' --Walter J. Ong, S.J.,author of The Presence of the Word "Dr...

...just like that...

...Robert O. Hoyt at the clinic...

...But then Nathanson resigned from the Center and after a period of reflection submitted another manuscript to the same prestigious publication, published in 1974 as "Deeper into Abortion...

...plenty of evidence was there for those with eyes to see...

...Vietnam offered many such examples of surgery...

...In short, Nathanson may be repeating two of his earlier mistakes...

...From his reflections on such data Nathanson now reasons that the fetus is a member of the human community, deserving of its protection, from the (now observable) moment it signals its presence by implanting itself in the uterus...

...sure enough, a news story published at about the time his book was being released reported evidence that a pregnant woman's immunological reaction to the presence of a fetus, which would otherwise result in its expulsion, is suppressed by a substance the fetus itself generates...