Book Reviews: Aborting America, Violent Death in the City: Suicide, Accident, and Murder in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia

Abstract

ABOF~TINC AMERICA. By Bernard N. Nathanson, M.D., with Richard N. Ostling. (Doubleday and Company, Garden City, N.Y.) (1979) 303 pp., $10.00. Prochoice activists were outraged in 1974 when New York obstetrician Bernard Nathanson published an article in the NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE substantially recanting the prochoice stance which led him to be a founder of the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws in 1969, and director of a large New York abortion clinic in 1971 and 1972. Now Nathanson has written a b w k which leads off with more autobiographical material than we want and follows with an account of the early years of the New York prochoice movement which is an arrogant and self-indulgent exercise in gratuitous hostility, ultimately raising more questions about Nathanson’s own psyche than about the moral and historical meaning of the movement he describes. After an embarrassingly narcissistic account of his grandparents, his education, and the illegal abortion of his college lover, Nathanson writes a n m tive familiar to students of the prochoice Literature from Margaret Sanger on: the rime of the ancient medical student, medical resident, or nurse struggling heroically against the hypocrisy and septicemia of the pre-Roe v. Wade era. Nathanson began his practice in a time when wealthy women bought the collusion of physicians and hospital abortion committees and poor women sought illegal abortionists or self-aborted, sometimes with serious or fatal effects. He became disgusted with the system at a time when a group of New York liberals led by Lawrence Lader needed a respectable obstetrician to grace their rolls. From this point on Nathanson’s story becomes a curious psychological document. His descriptions of his allies are couched in terms of such distaste it is difficult to remember that Nathanson was a willing participant, travelling, speaking and writing energetically. Nathanson seems to have two problems with his political bedfellows: he is mortally offended by feminists of any stripe, and he doesn’t like anybody very much. His reaction to the lobbying style of his (ultimately crucial) feminist political allies in Albany in 1970 is characteristic: There were knots of wild-eyed, straggly-haired women chasing panicked legislators through the Capitol halls. One breathless solon dove into a broom closet just behind me, and just ahead of a hunting