Chasing the Wind

Dr. Bernard Nathanson, co-founder of NARAL/Pro-Choice America, is confessing his sins. He was a leading abortion practitioner in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. In a column in Worldnet Daily, Dr. Nathanson tells the author how the founded a group to market the idea of abortion to America, and it was far more successful than they anticipated.

In marketing wars, the party that frames the terms of the debate almost always wins. And the early abortion marketers brilliantly succeeded in doing exactly that – diverting attention away from the core issues of exactly what abortion does to both the unborn child and the mother, and focusing the debate instead on a newly created issue: “choice.” No longer was the morality of killing the unborn at issue, but rather, “who decides.”

The original abortion-rights slogans from the early ’70s – they remain virtual articles of faith and rallying cries of the “pro-choice” movement to this day – were “Freedom of choice” and “Women must have control over their own bodies.”

“I remember laughing when we made those slogans up,” recalls Bernard Nathanson, M.D., co-founder of pro-abortion vanguard group NARAL, reminiscing about the early days of the abortion-rights movement in the late ’60s and early ’70s. “We were looking for some sexy, catchy slogans to capture public opinion. They were very cynical slogans then, just as all of these slogans today are very, very cynical.”

They made up slogans. They fabricated polls. They lied about figures. All in the name of drumming up business. Dr. Nathanson estimates he participated in or supervised 75,000 abortions.

Then along came technology. Ultrasound, electronic fetal heart monitoring, fetoscopy, cordocentesis. Technology that gave Dr. Nathanson a window into what was happening to the fetus.

“Anyway,” says Nathanson, “as a result of all of this technology – looking at this baby, examining it, investigating it, watching its metabolic functions, watching it urinate, swallow, move and sleep, watching it dream, which you could see by its rapid eye movements via ultrasound, treating it, operating on it – I finally came to the conviction that this was my patient. This was a person! I was a physician, pledged to save my patients’ lives, not to destroy them. So I changed my mind on the subject of abortion.”

Dr. Nathanson attempted to undo the damage he caused with his prior fradulent marketing, but the cork was already out of the bottle. He used an ultrasound machine to document an abortion at three months:

In 1985, intrigued by the question of what really happens during an abortion in the first three months of a pregnancy, Nathanson decided to put an ultrasound machine on the abdomen of a woman undergoing an abortion and to videotape what happens.

“We got a film that was astonishing, shocking, frightening,” he says.

It was made into a film called “The Silent Scream.” It was shattering, and the pro-abortion people panicked. Because at this point, we had moved the abortion debate away from moralizing, sermonizing, sloganeering and pamphleteering into a high-tech argument. For the first time, the pro-life movement now had all of the technology and all of the smarts, and the pro-abortion people were on the defensive.

In 1987 he made another film, narrated by Charlton Heston, called “Eclipse of Reason.” This film used a fetuscope to document a “partial birth abortion.” You can click that link above to get the desciption of the movie; I think it’s too horrendous to even quote here.

But Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a founder and strategist of the pro-abortion movement, is now one of their most vocal and staunch opponents.

Read the rest of How lying marketers sold Roe v. Wade to America. Abortion is still being marketed today; you can read the stories of former employees of the abortion industry and how they could no longer stand to sell abortions for a living.

Thanks to Nykola.com for the lead on this story.