Bernard Nathanson Became Pro-Life Because He Understood Unborn Babies are Human Beings
While the celestial heavens and the deepest pockets of the ocean remain mysterious to us on many levels, modern technology has made them less so, providing new and fascinating insights that we once lacked.
The same is true of another once baffling frontier: the womb.
Although it is the origination point of every human being who has ever walked this earth, for the greater part of history we’ve known little about our first home and how we came to be.
It was only in the late 1800’s, for example, that scientists understood that the union of male and female sex cells creates another human being. But beyond that, much remained a mystery.
Without any means to glimpse into the gestational cosmos, scientists could only speculate as to what occurs during pregnancy. Even well into the 20th Century, we possessed surprisingly little information about prenatal development.
As late as the 1969 edition of the Cumulative Index Medicus, a massive book listing every article published in every medical journal in the world, had just five articles under the heading of “fetus, physiology and anatomy of.”
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The void of facts made the product of abortion-on-demand easier to market. After all, it (not he or she) was just a clump of cells.
The late Dr. Bernard Nathanson addressed this lack of empirical data on human development in his autobiography The Hand of God. And he discussed the technological lightning bolt that struck him in the late 1970’s which led him to abandon his lucrative abortion practice and leadership role in the pro-abortion movement to become a staunch pro-life advocate.
That transformative tool was ultrasound which provided a window that revealed the miraculous process of human development. These scientific advancements, along with those arising from the study of genetics, sparked an abundance of research into life in utero.
Nathanson credits ultrasound with helping us “to learn more about the fetus since its advent than in almost all the history of medicine before that time.”
By 1979, he accounted for twenty-eight hundred articles on fetology in the Index Medicus, but by 1994 close to five thousand. Now, over 30 years later, how much more research has been done and articles written on human life in its earliest stages?
How little we knew then. How much more we know now.
It might be easier to understand someone’s support of abortion back in the “Dark Ages” when so little of fetology was known.
But how can anyone today, especially those who seemingly espouse “science” as their barometer of all things true, justify abortion?
They would have to be blind to facts.
Deaf to a heartbeat.
Indifferent to an innocent life moving right before their eyes.
Numb to dismemberment.
Desensitized to a violent death.
Callous to the crude disposal of human life.
They would be and, in fact, are the ultimate science-deniers.
So let us be relentless messengers of the beautiful biological truths we have learned in the last half century.
Let us incessantly proclaim the fact that every human life begins at the moment of fertilization.
Let us truly follow the science to build a culture of life.
LifeNews Note: Bonnie Finnerty, Education Director, Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation
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