The Dark History of Abortion Doctors

To reach pro-choice frontliners, pro-life advocates must understand their motives.

This article is the third of a four-part series based on the upcoming book by Marvin Olasky and Leah Savas, The Story of Abortion in America: A Street-Level History, 1652–2022.

British theologian and missionary Lesslie Newbigin said the church is a Christian’s “home base for a mission to the ends of the earth.” Is that true in spirit as well as in geography? Who is at the other end of the earth from a Christian pregnancy resource center, even though it’s located next door? And who might be under tremendous pressure in a post-Roe era?

Could it be an abortionist? Thirty years ago, I spent some time with Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who had professed faith in Christ after presiding over the biggest abortion business in New York City in 1971 and 1972. When he studied ultrasound video in 1974, though, Nathanson realized he had killed human beings. As pro-life advocates talked with him, Nathanson found comfort in “the special role for forgiveness” within Christianity.

I’ve read lots of books about and by abortionists and learned that each had a different rationale. Let’s start with Robert Spencer, who aborted at least 40,000 babies from the 1920s through the 1960s. Laudatory biographer Vincent Genovese wrote that Spencer “without any sense of loss” would “gently” place into a basin the tiny children he had just aborted.

Spencer felt no grief because as a student at Penn State he had become a confirmed Darwinist. “Zoologists look upon an embryo as a parasite. … Murder is the basis for life, for one form of life eats another,” he later wrote. “I am an evolutionist, hence I am an atheist. … The basic structure of all matter is electrical.” ...