By Peter Russo

The Hand of God by Dr. Bernard Nathanson, M.D. did not become an instant best seller when the first copies of it hit the bookstores. This is probably not due to any fault on the part of the author. Rather, it is the American public's unwillingness to face Dr. Nathanson. From Aborting America to The Hand of God, the true story of how abortion became legal throughout all nine months of pregnancy has been suppressed and ignored by the American press and the left-wing intellectuals who hold positions in every public institution in America.

In this book, written basically as an autobiography, Nathanson shows how his own early life, especially his strained relationship with his father, formed the doctor who would become the "Abortion King" of the 1970's. Mixing humor and wisdom into his already lucid and familiar way of writing, he talks about his medical school years where he met Karl Stern, a man whose conversion to Catholicism would help an atheistic yet pro-life Nathanson in the 1980's find a spiritual home in the Roman Catholic faith. As a resident in a woman's clinic, Nathanson saw the victims of botched, illegal abortions in the emergency room in a time before powerful antibiotics and modern blood transfusion techniques.

This galvanized Nathanson to help start NARAL, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, with Larry Lader and Betty Friedan. With NARAL, Dr. Nathanson started an almost one-man war against the laws restricting abortion in America. Before Sarah Weddington and Roe v. Wade, he helped shoot down the New York statue restricting abortion by manipulating the media and by channeling the antiauthoritarianism of the baby boomer generation into attacking the most visible form of hierarchical authority, the Roman Catholic Church.

In only a few short years, he helped make abortion legal in New York and operated the largest abortion clinic in the Western hemisphere. However, with the advent of ultra-sound technology, Nathanson started the hard road of converting from the recognized leader of the abortion forces of this country to the most powerful weapon of the pro-life movement. Along with these chapters detailing his journey from death to life, the author also includes chapters with his commentary on various social problems related to abortion. From fetal tissue experimentation to euthanasia, Nathanson shows the inherent anti-life mentality for what it is, a fundamental lack of respect for human life in all of its forms.

In the near ( or maybe far) future, the pro-life movement will eventually triumph, and life will be respected from conception to natural death. When this day comes, as it must, that generation will look back, and they will write in their history books about Dr. Bernard Nathanson, the leader of the abortion forces...a man who killed several unborn children with his own hands, the man who helped start the abortion holocaust, the undisputed "Abortion King." They will also write about his conversion. From atheism to Christianity, from destroying life to protecting life, the "Abortion King" died and was re-born as simply Bernard Nathanson, a man who found God. To any observer, past, present, or future, this change will seem so radical, so completely unexpected, so completely miraculous that only the hand of God could have caused it.

Peter Russo is a physics senior.