Dr. Nathanson
My name is Bernard N. Nathanson. I’m a physician, practicing obstetrician and gynecologist, and I think I’ve had a passing experience in matters of abortion. Now, when I was a medical student, in 1949, we had no such science as fetology. We were taught that the unborn child—the fetus—was something in the uterus, but it was really an article of faith as to whether or not it was a human being, and whether or not that human being had any unique, personal qualities.
But the whole story has changed since the 1970s. It was at that time that the science of fetology exploded in the medical community. It exploded by means of great new technologies, such as ultrasound imaging, electronic fetal heart monitoring, fetology, hysteroscopy, radio-immunochemistry, and a host of other dazzling technologies which today constitute, in fact, the corpus of the science of fetology.