(LifeSiteNews) — “Political language,” George Orwell once wrote, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” There is perhaps no situation in which those words are more applicable than the rise of the “pro-choice” worldview in North America. It is one based on ignorance, ideology, the repudiation of scientific evidence, and outright deceit. As a new wave of pro-abortion propaganda comes at us in a post-Roe America, it is worth remembering that their pre-Roe arguments were lies as well.
It is important when reviewing the history of the abortion movement to recognize the fact that many of the justifications for legalized abortion were not simply erroneous, but deliberate fabrications. We now know this because the past several decades have produced several prominent defectors from the abortion cause, and those defectors have laid out precisely how the abortion movement duped the public.
Dr. Bernard Nathanson was one of these defectors, and he was as high-ranking as they come. With infamous abortion champion Lawrence Lader, who died unrepentant in 2006 at the age of 86, Nathanson planned an abortion blitzkrieg. He related their strategy in his memoir The Hand of God:
By 1969, we were setting the agenda for a meeting of the leading national pro-abortion figures to take place in Chicago. Out of that meeting would emerge the fledgling National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), later changed to the National Abortion Rights Action League, and currently styling itself as the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. We were putting out feelers to Betty Friedan and her corps of feminists to join us in the revolution, coalition building with the Woodstock nation, and crushing the dinosaurs in the movement who would settle for watered-down measures… Lader, I, and a handful of others such as Howard Moody, then pastor of the Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, were the radicals, the Bolsheviks. We would settle for nothing less than striking down all existing abortion statutes and substituting abortion on demand.
An atheist, Nathanson practiced what he preached. He soon presided over the largest freestanding abortion facility in the world, operating in Manhattan. “It had,” says Nathanson, “10 operating rooms, 35 doctors, 85 nurses. It operated seven days a week, from 8 a.m. to midnight. We did 120 abortions every day in that clinic. At the end of the two years that I was the director, we had done 60,000 abortions. I myself, with my own hands, have done 5,000 abortions. I have supervised another 10,000 that residents have done under my direction. So I have 75,000 abortions in my lifetime.” Two of those abortions were Dr. Nathanson’s own children.
It was not Nathanson’s confessions of being an efficient and prolific abortionist that stunned both sides of the abortion debate when, in the mid-1970s, he began to explore the fledgling field of fetology and came to the sickening realization that he had been accomplice to the mass killing of developing human beings. It was his revelations concerning how brazenly the abortion movement had lied to the public. Slogans that had captured the public imagination and sprung from the lips of thousands of protestors: “freedom of choice,” “My body, my choice,” and a score of other mindless chants had been invented with derisive chuckles at those who adopted them with vigor. “I remember laughing when we made those slogans up,” Nathanson revealed. “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.”
These slogans were designed for a very specific purpose: to shift the abortion debate away from what was being chosen – a gruesome procedure that was very difficult to sell to the public – to choice, a lovely word that seemed to symbolize all that was good about Western democracy. Abortion activists didn’t particularly want to discuss the nitty-gritty details of abortion. They wanted to discuss the so-called “right” to choose abortion.
Following that, NARAL set out to convince the public that abortion was essential. More than that, they said, most people already thought so:
We persuaded the media that the cause of permissive abortion was a liberal, enlightened, sophisticated one… knowing that if a true poll were taken, we would be soundly defeated, we simply fabricated the results of fictional polls. We announced to the media that we had taken polls and that 60 percent of Americans were in favor of permissive abortion. This is the tactic of the self-fulfilling lie. Few people care to be in the minority. We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. The actual figure was approaching 100,000, but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1 million. Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public. The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200-500 annually. The figure we constantly fed to the media was 10,000. These false figures took root in the consciousness of Americans, convincing many that we needed to crack the abortion law.
Nathanson switched sides and eventually even converted to the Catholic Church, the very one he and Lawrence Lader had once successfully demonized as responsible for the deaths of women who obtained back-alley abortions. He became a fierce pro-life advocate, creating films such as The Silent Scream and The Eclipse of Reason, which exposed the gruesome reality of the abortion procedure and were seen by millions.
When the Canadian abortion movement began to use arguments that he himself had invented to push for the removal of all abortion restrictions, Dr. Nathanson went on TV in March of 1983 to debate Dr. Henry Morgentaler. Surgically and skillfully, Nathanson dismembered Morgentaler’s arguments, reducing the Canadian abortionist to a spluttering fury. At one point, Morgentaler admitted that he and his wife regretted the abortion they had procured during medical school and agreed with the host that the abortion industry was a business filled with “much sorrow.” As Morgentaler angrily denounced Nathanson, who calmly pointed out that he actually had more experience in the abortion industry than Morgentaler himself did, Nathanson cut to the chase: “You are not a physician, Dr. Morgentaler. You are an abortionist.”
It is no accident that many of the same lies used by the abortion movement in the 1960s and 1970s are being dusted off and reused now – and it’s important to remember that we know how those lies were invented.
