“Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints.” Psalm 116:15

February 15, 2024

February 21, 2011
Foreword by Angela Michael

I personally interviewed Dr. Bernard Nathanson several times on our St. Louis radio program. Even though he converted to being pro-life and a Christian, the tortuous deaths of thousands of babies he oversaw pained him. He let it be known how much he regretted being the father of NARAL.

Dr. Nathanson renounced the deceitful figures he gave decades ago misrepresenting back-alley abortion deaths. To this day, we have seen more women die by legalized abortion than by so-called back-alley abortions.

National Catholic Register- Daily News
Bernard Nathanson Dead at 84
‘I am one of those who helped usher in this barbaric age.’ After putting thousands of unborn children to death, he became one of the great leaders of the pro-life movement.
BY STEPHEN VINCENT
Posted 2/21/11 at 12:33 PM

NEW YORK — Dr. Bernard N. Nathanson, an obstetrician who oversaw the performance of about 75,000 abortions before becoming a leading pro-life advocate and a convert to the Catholic faith, died at his home in New York Feb. 21 after a prolonged battle with cancer. He was 84.

After performing his last abortion in 1979 and declaring himself to be pro-life, Nathanson produced the 1985 film The Silent Scream, which shows sonogram images of a child in the womb shrinking from an abortionist’s instruments, and the documentary film Eclipse of Reason, which displays and explains various abortion procedures in graphic detail. Both films had a significant impact on the abortion debate, solidified his credentials among pro-life advocates and earned him the scorn of his former pro-abortion friends and colleagues.

He also published a number of influential books, including Aborting America, written in 1979 with Richard Ostling, then a religion reporter for Time magazine, in which he exposed the deceptive and dishonest beginnings of the pro-abortion movement and undermined the argument that abortion is safe for women.

He often admitted that he and other abortion advocates in the 1960s lied about the number of women who died from illegal abortions at that time, inflating the figure from a few hundred to 10,000 to gain sympathy for their cause.

In his 1996 autobiography The Hand of God, he told the story of his journey from pro-abortion to pro-life, saying that viewing images from the new ultrasound technology in the 1970s convinced him of the humanity of the unborn baby. Outlining the enormous challenge of restoring a pro-life ethic, he wrote, “Abortion is now a monster so unimaginably gargantuan that even to think of stuffing it back into its cage … is ludicrous beyond words. Yet that is our charge — a herculean endeavor.”

He noted, regretfully, “I am one of those who helped usher in this barbaric age.”

His pro-life witness could not easily be dismissed as one-sided propaganda since Nathanson had enjoyed such a high standing among abortion supporters as a co-founder of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (now called NARAL ProChoice America), and as operator of what he called the nation’s busiest abortion business. The facility was opened in New York City after the state’s abortion laws were loosened in 1970 and abortion promoters realized that the high number of women seeking abortion could not all be admitted to a hospital for the procedure. A freestanding ambulatory clinic, in which abortion and recovery took about three hours, was an innovation devised by Nathanson and his colleagues.

Overall, Nathanson estimated, he presided over 60,000 abortions as director of the facility, instructed fellow practitioners in the performance of 15,000 other abortions, and personally performed about 5,000 abortions, including one on his own child conceived with a girlfriend in the 1960s.

Baptized Catholic

For more than a decade after he became pro-life, Nathanson described himself as a Jewish atheist, but in December of 1996 he was baptized a Catholic by Cardinal John O’Connor in a private Mass with a group of friends in New York ’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He also received confirmation and first Communion from the cardinal.

About his baptism, he said, “I was in a real whirlpool of emotion, and then there was this healing, cooling water on me, and soft voices, and an inexpressible sense of peace. I had found a safe place.”

Among those concelebrating the Mass was Father C. John McCloskey, an Opus Dei priest who had instructed Nathanson in the faith over a number of years.

“He was a pro-life prophet,” Father McCloskey said in a recent Register interview. “He saw the whole culture of death coming, and knew that abortion was just the tip of the iceberg.”

Nathanson visited Father McCloskey periodically over the course of a decade, the priest said, and one day in 1994 announced that he wanted to become a Catholic. After his baptism, Father McCloskey said, “He practiced the faith, he frequented the sacraments, and spoke about his Catholicism unabashedly.”

Nathanson later said that he was drawn closer to God while viewing a massive Operation Rescue event, when hundreds sat down in front of a New York Planned Parenthood building, blocking traffic. The sight of so many pro-lifers selflessly sacrificing their selves and risking arrest made him realize that they must be answering a higher call, he explained.

In an epilogue to the second edition of The Hand of God, Father McCloskey called the book “one of the more important autobiographies of the twentieth century,” which documents “man’s inhumanity both to humanity and to his personal self, and the possibility of redemption.”

Another strong factor in his conversion was the book Pillar of Fire, by noted psychiatrist Dr. Karl Stern, who tells of his own journey from Judaism to the Catholic Church. Nathanson studied briefly under Stern in medical school, though at that time he did not know about Stern’s conversion. It was only years later, when Nathanson read Pillar of Fire that he learned off his former professor’s religious views.

Nathanson’s godmother for baptism was Joan Andrews Bell, who had served more than a year in jail for blocking the entrances to abortion businesses.

She said she spoke to Nathanson by phone in February 2011, when he only had the strength to speak a few sentences. “He said he was praying for us, and I told him we love him and pray for him, too,” she said.

“He will be remembered as a very strong advocate for the babies,” she continued. “One factor stood out, knowing him over the years, and that was that he had a deep pain for what he had done in terms of abortion. I remember there were periods he was fasting; he underwent huge amounts of fasting to make up for it.”

She said that he had “a deep and tender heart,” and that once he saw the truth about abortion, he was determined to stop it. “He was like St. Paul , who was a great persecutor of the Church, yet when he saw the light of Christ, he was perhaps the greatest apostle for the Gospel. Dr. Nathanson was like that after his conversion. He went all around the world talking about the babies and the evils of abortion. Being his godmother was such an amazing thing, to see him come to Christ.”

Nathanson was married and divorced three times before being married in the Church by Father McCloskey soon after becoming a Catholic. His wife, Christine, survives him, as does his grown son, Joseph, by an earlier union.

A Doctor’s Son

Bernard Nathanson was born in New York City July 31, 1926. His father was a highly accomplished obstetrician/gynecologist who taught in various prestigious medical schools. Nathanson grew up with his younger sister in a secular Jewish home. As he explained in his autobiography, his father sent him to Hebrew school yet would question and undermine the teachings of the rabbis.

He described his father as an excellent and ethical physician who was less than exemplary in his personal life. He was dominating and overbearing, and cheated on his wife. Nathanson wrote that his sister “lost her personality” under their father’s influence and committed suicide at age 49, an event that grieved his father so greatly that he never mentioned her in conversation afterward.

Nathanson followed in his father’s footsteps, attending McGill University Medical College in Montreal , where he had his first experience with abortion after he got his girlfriend pregnant. He used the money received in the mail from his father to pay for her abortion, at a time when the procedure was illegal. “It served as my introductory excursion into the satanic world of abortion,” he later wrote.

After graduating from medical school in 1949, he did his residency in Chicago and New York , at one time working in the same hospital as his father. In 1953 he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and served for a few years as an obstetrician/gynecologist.

After his military stint, he settled in New York and began building a thriving ob-gyn practice. While working with poor patients, he saw the scarring effects of illegal abortions on the women. He wrote, “Illegal abortion was in 1967 the number one killer of pregnant women.”

In New York , he got another girlfriend pregnant and decided to perform an abortion on her himself. About aborting his own child, he wrote in The Hand of God: “I swear to you that I had no feelings aside from the sense of accomplishment, the pride of expertise.”

He added, describing the abortionist’s mindset: “icy; conscienceless; remorselessly perverting his medical skills; defiling his ethical charge; and helping, nay seducing, with his clinical calm, his oh-so-comforting professionalism, women into the act that comes closest to self-slaughter.”

Busiest Abortion Business

While not giving up his ob-gyn practice, Nathanson became heavily involved in abortion in 1968 after meeting Larry Lader, a politically connected public relations master who was obsessed with overturning New York ’s abortion laws. In looking for an easy target to attack for media attention, Nathanson said, they chose the Catholic Church, whose opposition to abortion they blamed for every botched illegal abortion they brought before the media.

Bolstered by a coalition of abortion doctors and a burgeoning feminist movement, New York ’s lawmakers passed a bill to overturn the state’s century-old abortion restrictions, which was signed into law by Republican Gov. Nelson Rockefeller on July 1, 1970.

Soon Nathanson was the director of the new Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health (CRASH) in Manhattan , which he described as the “largest abortion clinic in the Western world,” with referrals from all along the Eastern seaboard and beyond.

Looking back on those years, he wrote, “I had a young son and a wife, but I was hardly ever at home. I bitterly regret those years, if for no other reason than that I failed to see my son grow up.”

As he became more publicly associated with abortion, he was treated as a “pariah” in legitimate medical circles and received fewer obstetrical referrals. For these reasons, he decided to leave the abortion facility at the end of 1972 and took the position as chief of obstetrics at St. Luke’s Hospital, where he kept doing abortions for what he considered “medically justified reasons.”

Yet the advent of ultrasound technology eventually convinced him that a true human being is killed in abortion, and he began to develop what he called the “vector theory of life.” By this he meant that from the time of conception, the unborn child has a self-directed force of life that, if not interrupted, will lead to the birth of a human baby. He knew this was not “potential life,” as the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade.

Writing in The Hand of God, Nathanson described a turning point in his thinking: “I believe the fertilized ovum (zygote) to be a new individual launched along an unimaginably busy vector of life that terminates when the vector finally moves its 180 degrees to the negative pole.”

The trajectory of this insight would lead him to his own 180-degree turn in thinking and eventually to work against legal abortion and the industry that promoted it.

Funeral arrangements are pending.

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Illinois Abortion Clinic promises Hope, Delivers "A Nightmare"

By Restoration News • October 28, 2025

Oct 27, 2025 Samantha Flom Abortion | Follow the Money Patients' reviews of Granite City's longtime abortion mill describe the horrors and potential crimes that take place inside its walls. Less than 10 miles to the northeast of St. Louis sits Illinois' oldest continuously operating abortion clinic. Granite City's deceptively named Hope Clinic is well known in the Midwest for its long history of butchering babies since 1974—just one year after the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade. Much less publicized is the clinic's apparent history of butchering women. A search of Madison County's court records turns up decades of lawsuits accusing Hope Clinic and its abortionists of medical malpractice, negligence, and even wrongful death. Dozens of Google reviews build on those claims with chilling tales of unsanitary conditions, verbal abuse, and lasting physical and emotional trauma. Still, the clinic not only remains open but has now expanded to include a swanky new location in Uptown Chicago that advertises "all-trimester" abortions. So, how does a business plagued by litigation and poor reviews manage to survive? Nameless, faceless donors obscured by the Left's favorite dark money network. The Abortion Mill At one point, it was Granite City's old steel mill that drew people from across the country to the area. "Now, it's the abortion mill," said Angela Michael, CEO of Small Victories Pregnancy Outreach. Hope Clinic has made headlines in recent years for the sheer volume of traffic the facility continues to receive from states with stricter abortion laws since Roe's reversal. In Illinois, abortion is legal for any reason up until fetal viability—or roughly 22 to 24 weeks' gestation—and to protect the mother's life and health after that. Hope Clinic's Granite City location offers abortions as late as 27 weeks and six days into a pregnancy, or the end of the second trimester, making the facility a popular choice for desperate women seeking late-term abortions. "[Women from] all 50 states are flown in, and families come with them, so it's just very sad to see," Michael said. Those who arrive at the clinic are likely to find Michael, her husband Daniel, and their mobile pregnancy center out front. For more than three decades, the Highland couple has been helping Hope Clinic patients choose life for their babies by offering free pregnancy testing, ultrasounds, counseling, doctor referrals, and baby supplies to those in need. Michael estimates they've saved more than 7,000 babies through their efforts and convinced several abortion workers to leave the industry. "They have come out and blindsided me and told me, 'I'm leaving today, Angela. Your ministry's changed my life. I'm going out to do what real nurses should be doing," she said. But along with those miracles, they've also seen tragedies. "Almost two years ago in December, we saw four ambulances in one week," Michael recalled, noting that she chronicles everything she witnesses and learns about the clinic on her two websites and Facebook page. "People have shared with me, written me letters about the inside of that abortion clinic, the filthiness, and I've reported it," she said. "Just the stench was a turn-off to some of the women that went in there, and they would change their minds and not go through with it." A 'Nightmare' of a Misnomer Hope Clinic greets all visitors with a banner out front that reads: "Where there's hope, there's choice." On its website, the facility promotes itself as a provider of "safe" and "compassionate" care. Dozens of lawsuits and Google reviews* suggest otherwise. In 2018, one reviewer said she accompanied a 16-year-old family member to the clinic for an abortion performed by a male Indian doctor, whom she described as "rough, insensitive, and disrespectful." "He stabbed a needle forcefully into her pelvis without warning and went to great lengths to ensure her procedure was as painful as possible!" she wrote. She added that the abortionist treated the teen "like trash" and "yelled and screamed" in the hallway. "I felt this man had no respect for women at all. I would not recommend this clinic to any woman, it's a nightmare!" Hope-Clinic-review-2-screenshot.png Michael said the abortionist was likely Dr. Yogendra Shah, Hope Clinic's longtime chief abortionist, whom she said was forced out by new management this past February. "He eventually resigned because we exposed him to everybody, but this guy was the one that was doing the abortions that day when we had the four ambulances show up," she noted. Numerous other reviews complain of a doctor of the same description and with the same temperament. One woman noted that an Indian doctor "was so rough" with her during her procedure that she screamed and cried. Contrary to the "hope" the clinic promised, she wrote that she left feeling "hopeless and defeated." Another reviewer mentioned Shah by name, noting that he yelled at her for crying out in pain during procedure. "He was too rough, had no empathy or sympathy," she wrote. She also disclosed that she had since learned Shah denuded the lining of her uterus into the muscle to the point where she "bled for a month" and needed a hysteroscopy, laparoscopy, and another dilation and curettage to determine the extent of the damage. Other testimonials described instances where women needed emergency medical treatment to repair the damage done to their bodies, including a review posted just five months ago. "I began to bleed excessively—so much that they were filling bags with my blood," the patient wrote. "Despite repeatedly telling them I felt like I was going to die, my concerns were ignored, and no immediate action was taken." After two hours, she said the clinic told her that if she stayed there any longer, she could die. "I was rushed to the ER, where they immediately gave me blood and performed emergency surgery to save my life." Hope-Clinic-review-screenshot-1.png Describing the experience as "incredibly traumatic and dangerous," the woman added that she intended to sue. If she does, she will join a lengthy list of other women and families that have sued the clinic and its staff over the years. Shah has been named specifically in more than a dozen lawsuits, including two wrongful death suits, most of which have been settled out of court. In one notable case, patient Melanie Mills sued him for performing an abortion on her when she wasn't even pregnant. Mills went on to become an outspoken pro-life advocate. The Michaels have also sued the clinic. Their lawsuit, settled in 2007, accused a clinic escort of shoving their daughter to the ground and alleged Shah tried to run Michael's husband over with his car. "They've gotten away with so much violence, it's just, it's unbelievable," she said. Possible Criminal Activity One particularly troubling testimonial describes what at the very least appears to be a case of uncaring and unprofessional treatment by Hope Clinic staff. At most, it could be a crime. "This was by far the worst experience of my life," wrote the patient, who allegedly scheduled a surgical abortion at the clinic in September 2023. At her first appointment, she said the doctor's manual opening of her cervix "hurt extremely bad" and that she only received ibuprofen for the pain. She was then told to go back to her hotel until the morning, when she would be dilated enough for the procedure. At 4 a.m., the patient awoke to intense cramping and realized she was in labor. She called the clinic and was advised to take pain medication and see if that helped. It didn't. When she arrived at the clinic two hours later, she was in so much pain she couldn't walk. "My Uber [driver] had to hold me up," she wrote. Once inside, she told a nurse that she felt faint. The nurse's alleged response was to advise her to go to the emergency room. After a friend helped her convince the nurse over the phone to let her stay, the patient sank to the floor, crying and screaming in pain. Feeling overheated, she requested help removing her shirt. Instead of helping her, the nurse reportedly just "stood there and looked" at her until asked again. After finally removing the patient's shirt, the nurse told her to stand up "without offering help or nothing." Eventually, the nurse assisted her, and as she stood up, she realized her baby was crowning. She was then taken back to a treatment room where she delivered her baby. "I sat [there] 20 minutes with a baby hanging from inside of me," she wrote. "I cried ... I could feel the baby just sitting by my vaginal area." After that, she said the experience was "not too bad" because staff gave her anesthesia "to finish." What happened next is a mystery, though the reviewer's account appears to suggest her child received no immediate medical attention after it was born. As she does not disclose how far along her pregnancy was, it could be that the child was not viable. But as this woman's baby was large enough for her to feel it hanging out of her body and lying next to her, the circumstances certainly warrant further investigation. Under the federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002, infants born alive after failed abortions are entitled to equal protection under the law. Though Illinois law does not specifically mandate protections for such infants—a proposal to that effect is pending—failing to provide them with necessary medical care could constitute criminal child neglect under existing law. The problem is getting the right people to care. Michael said she has tried countless times to get someone to investigate. "I have approached senators, I have approached politicians, I've even gone to Democrats that my husband grew up with," she said. "It's just amazing how everybody's covering up what's happening here in Illinois." Out of Sight, Out of Mind The evidence of a cover-up is compelling. While investigating a June 2022 incident at Hope Clinic, pro-life group Operation Rescue found evidence clinic staff were using private backchannels to secretly request medical transports for patients. When the organization's Freedom of Information Act request for the clinic's 911 call returned no responsive records, the group checked the emergency dispatch recordings for the corresponding time frame. Eight minutes before witnesses saw the ambulance arrive at the clinic, a dispatcher was recorded asking, "EMS, can you contact us back for a possible transport?" The dispatcher provided no additional details as to the emergency in question, though Operation Rescue holds that it must have been the Hope Clinic emergency. The group described the dispatcher's request for a phone call as "an obvious attempt to subvert the 911 system, a publicly available recording." In 2023, Operation Rescue documented 15 medical emergencies at Hope Clinic that required medical transfers, including three within one week in November. In one case, the pro-life group filed a formal complaint with the Illinois Department of Public Health after an abortionist perforated the uterus of a 13-year-old statutory rape victim. “It is unknown whether the abortionist who performed the botched abortion reported the child’s rape,” Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue, said at the time. “My staff is looking into this and filing a formal complaint concerning this middle-school aged girl who was already violated sexually and then violated again by the blood-thirsty abortionists at this hopelessly dangerous facility.” The health department wrote back that the complaint "may or may not trigger an investigation," and that if one ensued, officials would be in touch. No further communication ever occurred. Journalist Megan Twohey—one of the reporters who broke the Harvey Weinstein scandal—has also reported on state officials' lack of transparency and curiosity when it comes to abortion-related data. In a 2011 article in the Chicago Tribune, Twohey noted that what little information was available to the public was so opaque "it was impossible to determine" whether six abortion-related deaths the Tribune had uncovered were ever documented. In a separate report, Twohey detailed the massive gaps in statewide abortion data. She found that state regulators recorded between 7,000 and 17,000 fewer abortions per year than those identified by a national research group and suggested that regulators "may be allowing doctors and clinics to operate off the books." Twohey also found that nearly 4,000 reports of abortion complications in 2009 were missing their required descriptions. "Health care providers who intentionally fail to submit accurate and complete reports are committing a criminal act, and a failure to report abortion complications is grounds for revoking their licenses, but the Department of Public Health has never sought disciplinary action against a provider," the journalist wrote. (RELATED: Illinois Doubles Down on Abortion Extremism, Forces Colleges to Offer Abortion Pills) Dark Money Covers Dark Deeds State officials have since revised the Public Health Department's abortion data collection and reporting methods to make the truth even less accessible. In 2023, the department announced that it would only report aggregate-level abortion totals for Illinois residents and out-of-state residents rather than county or state-specific totals. Additionally, the state now only reports age ranges for abortion patients instead of their specific ages, among other changes. Officials claimed the changes were to boost patient privacy. When you follow the money, however, another possible motive emerges. Tax filings reviewed by Restoration News reveal that from 2016 to 2023, Hope Clinic's Granite City location received more than $5.1 million in grant funding from Hopewell Fund. Hopewell is one of many shell nonprofits in the dark money web weaved by Arabella Advisors, the Left's limitless shadow ATM nestled deep in the heart of the Washington Swamp. Abortion, meanwhile, is Democrats' golden calf—the issue they can always count on exploiting to drive their blue-haired base to the polls. With deep-pocketed progressives keeping Hope Clinic's doors open, it should come as no surprise that Illinois' Democrat-controlled government—spearheaded by the state's abortion-obsessed Gov. J.B. Pritzker—has no interest in what really goes on inside. "Pritzker, our wonderful governor here, basically let the abortionists inside Hope Clinic write" the state's Reproductive Health Care Act of 2019, Michael said. The law established that women have "a fundamental right" to kill their babies in utero until fetal viability, as determined by their abortionist. It also repealed a 1975 trigger ban on all abortions except those deemed necessary to save a woman's life. The new law, Michael said, "only protects the abortionists, and there are no regulations. They don't even get inspected." With state officials refusing to look under the hood, Michael said she fears for the unsuspecting women who walk through Hope Clinic's doors. "These girls are taking a risk, and they don't understand," she said. "I tell them, 'You may leave in a body bag today because these people are not held accountable.'" *Editor's note: The names of these reviewers have been withheld for their privacy. (READ MORE: 'Plan C': The Dark Money Activists Smuggling the Abortion Pill into Red States)