Barnett Slepian, the abortionist killed by a sniper in his Amherst, New York, home October 23, was apparently considering converting from his career as an abortionist, according to a story in the November 5 issue of The Wanderer, a national Catholic newspaper.

According to the article by Paul Likoudis, about a year before he was fatally shot, Dr. Slepian invited pro-lifers Bob Behn and his wife, Bonnie, who had sidewalk-counseled outside his abortion mills for nearly a decade, to have lunch with him.

Lunch turned into a two-hour meeting. 'We talked about the 'pros and cons' of abortion,' Behn told The Wanderer. 'It was very, very obvious that he was trying to make excuses for what he did. He knew it was wrong, but he was trying to make it right. 'At one point, he said he was 'pro-life' and I said, 'How can you say that and do abortions?' 'I'm forced to do them,' Behn recalled Slepian saying. 'The women want them and I have to do them.'

Behn continued: 'We talked about spirituality, and I asked him how he was doing. I tried to talk to him about Jesus. After the meeting, he began being friendly with us. He'd stop to talk to us and the other sidewalk counselors. 'Almost every day, he'd have a different question to ask us, questions about our faith, about Jesus, about how we could know we are saved and whether or not he could be saved.'

At one point during that lunch meeting, Slepian asked Behn why the pro-lifers had picketed his house. 'I told him directly: We want to witness to you. We want you to repent. We don't want you to go to Hell.'

How close was Slepian to a conversion?

Behn told The Wanderer that the Buffalo-area pro-life Clergy Council had invited Slepian to address its monthly meeting, and Slepian--who had expressed interest in attending--had promised to give his answer on Saturday, the day after he was killed. 'We're certainly not happy Slepian's dead,' Behn said. 'It's going to make things very hard for pro-lifers, expecially the sidewalk counselors.'

According to pro-life sources in Buffalo who spoke with The Wanderer, Slepian's father was a notorious illegal abortionist on the western New York circuit in the years before abortion was legalized by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller.

When rescue operations started at Buffalo-area abortion facilities in 1988, Slepian was performing abortions at four clinics: Erie Medical Center (now closed), Erie County Hospital, Children's Hospital, and Buffalo GYN Women-services, the mill most frequently visited by pro-life rescuers.

Pro-lifers who maintained a consistent watch at the mills where he worked say that he was possibly doing as many as 50 abortions a day.

Slepian once told a pro-life colleague that the reason he aborted babies was that he could make four times as much money in a third of the time, as compared to routine ob-gyn work.