By DEXTER DUGGAN
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — A leading pro-life legislator in the U.S. House of Representatives attributed his position today to the influence of the woman whose funeral he had just attended in this Phoenix suburb.
Cong. Trent Franks (R., Ariz.) told The Wanderer that a speech given about 37 years ago by a national pro-life leader of that time, Carolyn Gerster, MD, “changed the direction of my life.”
Just after Gerster’s February 5 funeral at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church, Franks said that her talk at a Dallas gathering “moved me so deeply that I became committed to that cause ever since….It’s very unlikely I would be in Congress or carrying the nation’s major pro-life bills” without having heard her talk.
Gerster, 88, may not be a familiar name these days to teenagers hoisting their “I Am the Pro-Life Generation” signs across the nation, but she was a vital participant in forming the infant national pro-life movement beginning in the early 1970s, a cause taken up powerfully by successive generations.
In Congress, Franks sponsors the federal Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act, against abortion for sex and race-selection and genetic conditions; the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, sharply limiting abortion against preborn babies at least 20 weeks old, and the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, requiring medical care for babies who survive abortion.
The bills all have passed the House and await Senate approval, Franks said, adding that if a pro-life president occupies the White House, they’ll be signed into law.
Starting in the late 1960s, a swelling preoccupation by the U.S. elite to impose legalized abortion around the nation had generated a response by fledgling right-to-life organizations, often led by physicians and attorneys.
They recognized the implications of the assault against traditional pro-life medical ethics as hallowed both in the ancient Hippocratic Oath and 20th Century Declaration of Geneva.
Gerster, an internist and cardiologist, co-founded the Arizona Right to Life Committee in 1971, two years before the U.S. Supreme Court jumped in to impose sweeping national permissive abortion and overthrow the growing successes of young pro-life organizations.
Meanwhile, surgeon Mildred F. Jefferson, MD, in Boston helped found Massachusetts Citizens for Life.
These two women had forged their own remarkable medical careers at a time when the profession was male-dominated.
Graduating from medical school at age 22, the precocious Gerster joined the U.S. Army as a Medical Service Officer and rose to the rank of captain. Jefferson was the first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School and first female doctor at the then-Boston University Medical Center.
Gerster and Jefferson, both non-Catholics, soon became leaders and familiar attractive faces at the lectern in the national pro-life movement, a refutation of media stereotypes that professional women — indeed, all women — should be taking up the banner for massive permissive abortion.
So powerfully did Jefferson refute media memes that opponent Planned Parenthood had to bestir itself and appoint black nurse Faye Wattleton as national PP president to try to counteract its white-male leadership image.
Jefferson, born in 1926, died in 2010.
One of Gerster’s biggest disappointments must have turned out to be that the permissive abortion mandated in 1973 by the Supreme Court continued as U.S. law for the rest of her earthly life.
Aboundingly optimistic and looking for the best in everyone, the self-effacing Gerster would express the view that even abortionists just had the wrong information and hadn’t seen the light yet. But she obviously expected that they soon would.
Sometimes her optimism was justified, but many pro-abortionists continued to disappoint her and dig in their heels.
One rewarding conversion Gerster celebrated was that of New Yorker Bernard Nathanson, MD, a co-founder of the radical National Association to Repeal Abortion Laws in 1969. Awareness of the growing medical evidence of the humanity of preborn babies led Nathanson to change his views completely.
Nathanson explored his transformation in his book Aborting America (Doubleday, 1979), written with Time magazine associate editor Richard Ostling.
Luz Fuenzalida, a veteran Phoenix sidewalk counselor outside abortion clinics and longtime acquaintance of Gerster, was among those at the funeral.
Fuenzalida recalled for The Wanderer an occasion when Nathan-
son came to attend a dinner by Arizona Right to Life after his conversion. She said Nathanson sat with Gerster while they watched about 20 young children carrying candles, with the lights extinguished one after another, representing babies’ lives taken by abortion.
Both Nathanson and Gerster had tears in their eyes, Fuenzalida said.
Gerster was married for 57 years to Josef Gerster, MD, also a cardiologist. They practiced medicine together in Scottsdale and had five sons.
Josef died at age 91 on Father’s Day 2015 and also had a funeral Mass celebrated in the same church where Carolyn’s was soon to be. The Gersters both had become Catholics in the final years of their lives.
A native of Germany, Josef was able to tell Carolyn firsthand of the deadly “quality of life” viewpoint promoted by the medical and legal professions living in Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist dictatorship.
Having met the Gersters in the 1970s, I recall watching the Nazi propaganda film Ich klage an (I Accuse) one evening at the Gersters’ Paradise Valley, Ariz., home as a demonstration of the chilling similarities between the Nazi philosophy and the United States elite’s “quality of life” views.
The pro-euthanasia Ich klage an, banned by the victorious Allied powers after World War II, was commissioned by the Nazi government to win public sympathy for “mercy-killing.” The film presented the case of a woman suffering from multiple sclerosis who begged for death.
Her husband is put on trial for honoring her wish, but he turns the perspective around to say he “accuses” those who would prevent such “mercy.” The intended effect of the propaganda film was to make Germans ashamed of opposing Nazi “mercy-killing.”
Ironically, Carolyn Gerster was acquainted with Arizona Appeals Court Judge Sandra O’Connor, a strong pro-abortionist named to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1981 by recently elected Republican President Ronald Reagan, an avowed pro-lifer.
The two successful women belonged to the same country club, and the sons in their respective families also were acquainted.
When word began to spread around the nation of O’Connor’s pro-abortion reputation in Arizona after Reagan named her, O’Connor misled the Reagan administration by saying she didn’t disagree with Gerster’s views on abortion. The Reaganites were careful to avoid asking pro-life leader Gerster if this was true.
The fix was in, and the Republicans gave another stab in the back to pro-lifers.
A Pro-Life Giant
As the pro-life leader’s funeral concluded on February 5, a bagpiper playing Amazing Grace piped her casket out of the church to the white hearse waiting in the bright sunlight.
A veteran attorney and a longtime physician at the funeral who’d known Gerster since their professional studies as young men took a moment to speak with The Wanderer.
Seasoned pro-life activist and attorney John Jakubczyk said: “She’s the best. She’s the kind of example this current generation needs to follow. . . . We thank God for the years she gave and sacrificed for the unborn.”
Michael Rock, MD, said Gerster was “a complete person, a role model, certainly a pro-life giant, locally, nationally, internationally” who could give “the most erudite speech.”
A trivia fact about Gerster was that she appeared with her maiden name of Carolyn Taylor as a guest on the popular national television program What’s My Line? in the mid-1950s and drew whistles for her attractive appearance. Celebrity panelists tried to guess a person’s occupation. Syndicated newspaper columnist Dorothy Kilgallen correctly guessed Taylor was a doctor.
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