c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon, served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal. He now heads Prison Fellowship International, an evangelical Christian ministry to the imprisoned and their families. Contact Colson via e-mail at 71421.1551(at)compuserve.com.)

UNDATED _ This is the season of transformation, when many of us promise to give up smoking, drinking, sulking or whatever other practice has us by the throat. Yet even as we hope, many harbor the nagging fear that long-standing habits will be too hard to break; that the burden of the past will be too heavy to escape.

Allow me to offer evidence that the most incredible changes really are possible. I do not offer abstractions, but instead the very real person of Dr. Bernard Nathanson, once an abortion advocate, now an ardent foe. Here are changes of truly biblical proportion.

Bernard Nathanson can rightly be called the founding father of American abortion. He was an early advocate of abortion on demand, and a very dedicated practitioner. Nathanson persuaded his pregnant girlfriend to abort their child in the 1940s, and many years later aborted one of his own children. During his heyday in the movement, when he helped found the organization that would become the National Abortion Rights Action League, Dr. Nathanson found time to oversee 75,000 abortions.

Then came a major change.

Scientific advances _ particularly ultrasound technology _ made him rethink his position. The technology showed him beating hearts within small human forms. Unlike many of his pro-abortion colleagues, Nathanson was willing to acknowledge what he saw with his own two eyes. And so, in the early 1980s, he produced”The Silent Scream,”a film graphically depicting a fetus being aborted, a film that marked his transformation from America’s chief abortionist to one of the most devastating witnesses for the pro-life movement.

Not surprisingly, this dramatic change did not gain nearly the attention that would be accorded, say, a third-string shortstop on a AAA ball club announcing his engagement to his former Boy Scout platoon leader. Quite the contrary. Nathanson performed a highly treasonous act that embarrassed our political elite. The less said, the better.

But let no one mistake the profound nature of this defection. In political terms, it was as if Thomas Jefferson, founder of the Democratic Party, had crossed the Atlantic to join up with George III. Or, in spiritual terms, as if Madalyn Murray O’Hair had showed up at the door of a convent shouting”Let Me In!” Which brings us to the second stage of this incredible journey.

Just a few weeks ago, I was honored to join a group of about 80 Christian believers in a private chapel of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. There, Cardinal John O’Connor baptized Nathanson into the faith. Sponsoring Nathanson was Joan Andrews, who had spent five years in jail for her anti-abortion activism. The best Hollywood scriptwriter would be hard-pressed to come up with a more dramatic moment.

What brought a former atheistic Jew to the baptismal font?

Reality.

Once so very self-assured that fetuses were only blobs of tissue, Nathanson now knew he really had been killing human beings all those years. He had killed his own child. There was no hiding in pro-choice rhetoric. There was blood on his hands, lots of it.

Surely all of us, no matter our position on abortion, can sympathize with this hellish quandary. Who has not had a change of heart that makes us see our past in a different light? Imagine if that past involved the extermination of 75,000 lives.

It was time for the second big change.

While researching the ethics of abortion clinic protests in 1989, Nathanson was impressed by a group of more than 1,000 anti-abortion activists who prayed and sang in front of a clinic as onlookers ridiculed them. Why are they doing this, Nathanson wondered. It was at that very moment, he later wrote, that he seriously began entertaining the idea that there was a God in heaven who leads people to take on such despised work. Perhaps, he thought, such a God that would forgive even him.

Up to that point, forgiveness had been a foreign concept, yet without forgiveness Nathanson was doomed. This was, to put it mildly, a propitious moment in the life of Bernard Nathanson. It was then that he discovered in Christianity his sins could be forgiven.

I was struck during the baptism not only by the epic nature of his journey, but also by what it says about our society.

On the epic side, one could easily be reminded of St. Paul, who went from being a vigorous persecutor of Christians to Christianity’s greatest evangelist. Nathanson had gone from vigorous abortionist to passionate pro-life advocate.

He also fled a godless universe, in which aborting children is no better or worse than removing kidney stones, to take up residence in a universe of love and hope, where innocent human lives are protected.

I was struck as well during the baptism by the realization where the ultimate power is. While the pro-choice forces had won a political victory in Congress in the partial-birth abortion battle, here stood Nathanson and Cardinal O’Connor beneath the cross.

Here was a victory never to be undone. The victory of the cross.

MJP END COLSON