Dr. Bernard N. Nathanson, formerly a campaigner for abortion rights who, after experiencing a change of heart in the 1970s became a prominent opponent of abortion and the on-screen narrator of the anti-abortion film “The Silent Scream,” died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 84. The cause was cancer, said his wife, Christine.

Dr. Nathanson, an obstetrician-gynecologist practicing in Manhattan, helped found the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws in 1969 and served as its medical adviser…

In a widely reported 1974 article in The New England Journal of Medicine, “Deeper into Abortion,” Dr. Nathanson described his growing moral and medical qualms about abortion. “I am deeply troubled by my own increasing certainty that I had in fact presided over 60,000 deaths.”

His unease was intensified by the images made available by the new technologies of fetoscopy and ultrasound. “For the first time, we could really see the human fetus, measure it, observe it, watch it, and indeed bond with it and love it,” he later wrote in “The Hand of God: A Journey from Death to Life by the Abortion Doctor Who Changed His Mind” (Regnery Publishing, 1996). “I began to do that…”

Dr. Nathanson earned a degree in bioethics from Vanderbilt University in 1996 and that year was baptized as a Roman Catholic — he described himself up to that time as a Jewish atheist — in a private ceremony at St. Patrick’s Cathedral by Cardinal John J. O’Connor, the archbishop of New York.

Read More: www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/us/22nathanson.html