By Tim Waggoner
TORONTO, ON, July 29, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - On July 9, 2008, CFRB talk show host, Spider Jones, interviewed former abortionist Dr. Bernard Nathanson about his past involvement in the abortion movement and his conversion to the pro-life viewpoint.
At one time Nathanson was deeply entrenched in the American pro-abortion movement, having co-founded the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) and overseen 75,000 abortions as director of an abortion clinic. During the CFRB program Nathanson recalled the deceitful and dishonest tactics that he and NARAL relied upon to push for the legalization and acceptance of abortion.
"We claimed that between five and ten thousand women a year died of botched abortions," he said. "The actual figure was closer to 200 to 300 and we also claimed that there were a million illegal abortions a year in the United States and the actual figure was close to 200,000. So, we were guilty of massive deception."
"I mean as a founding member and chairman of the medical committee, I accepted the figures which came from a biostatistician named Christopher Teetsy and he and his wife passed along these figures to us at NARAL. We were in no position to validate them or not, so we accepted them in the interests of higher standards, or at least higher objectives," he explained.
Nathanson's conversion to the pro-life movement was sparked by the advent of the ultrasound machine in the early 1970s. He related how his heart was moved to realize that a fetus is in fact a human being after he watched an unborn baby recoil from a vacuum abortion device before being sucked from its mother's womb.
Nathanson titled the video of this incident "The Silent Scream" and began using it to spread the pro-life message. Planned Parenthood, however, took a page out of NARAL's book when the abortion giant spread rumors that the video was a fake. Nathanson confirmed that these rumors, like the tactics of NARAL, were lies.
"Planned Parenthood was responsible for that," he said. "But it was not faked and what we did in order to validate it was to go to Dr. Ian Donald in Scotland, who is the father of ultra-sound, the inventor of ultra-sound and he looked at the film and he swore an affidavit that everything was as it was shown and there was no doctoring or manipulation or any changes in the speed or anything else."
Nathanson then addressed the fact that abortion is now used as a form of birth control - a result of another pro-abortion fabrication.
"One of the myths that was fed to the public through the media was that legalizing abortion would only mean that abortions taking place illegally, would be done legally. But in fact, abortion is now being used primary as a method of birth control all over the world and in the USA. too."
Pro-abortion advocates "refuse to see what most people are now conceding, that the fetus is a human being and we have no business massacring it in large numbers," concluded Dr. Nathanson.
