From pro-choice atheist to pro-life Catholic

Jennifer Fulwiler of the "Et Tu?" blog has written an article for America magazine (ht: Amy Welborn) about her journey from atheism to Catholicism, focusing on how her understanding of abortion and what it means to be pro-life changed during that time:

Back in my pro-choice days, I read that in certain ancient societies it was common for parents to abandon unwanted newborns, leaving them to die of exposure. I found these stories to be as perplexing as they were horrifying. How could this happen? I could never understand how entire cultures could buy into something so obviously terrible, how something that modern society understands to be an unthinkable evil could be widely accepted among large groups of people.

Because of my deep distress at hearing of such crimes against humanity, I found it irritating when pro-lifers would refer to abortion as “killing babies.” Obviously, nobody was in favor of killing babies, and to imply that those of us who were pro-choice would advocate as much was an insult to the babies throughout history who actually were killed by their “insane” societies. We were not in favor of killing anything. We simply felt that a woman had a right to stop the growth process of a fetus if she faced a crisis pregnancy. It was unfortunate, but that was the sacrifice that had to be made to prevent women from becoming victims of unwanted pregnancies.

At that time I was an atheist and had little exposure to religious social circles. As I began to search for God and open my mind to Christianity, however, I could not help but be exposed to pro-life thought more often, and I was put on the defensive about my views. One night I was discussing the topic with my husband, who was re-examining his own pro-choice stance. He made a passing remark that startled me into reconsidering this issue: “It just occurred to me that being pro-life is being pro-other-people’s-life,” he quipped. “Everyone is pro-their-own-life.”

Definitely read the entire piece.

Although Fulwiler was raised in an atheist setting, her story is similar in many ways to that of Lorraine Murray, author of Confession of an Ex-Feminist, especially in how the so-called "sexual revolution" turned out to be a nightmare in many different ways. Murray writes, in the introduction to her book:

Now, if you are fortunate enough to have led a sunny life with myriad memories of joyful picnics and sweet meanderings along the seashore, writing your life story might be a happy endeavor to undertake. For me, though, the project has meant reliving bitter moments, such as a childhood crippled by my father's gambling addiction, and my thoroughly wild years in college, when I lived in an apartment complex aptly nicknamed "Sin City".
 
Some readers, I fear, may be scandalized by this book, when they realize how many years I went my merry way as a sinner, dabbling in sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and launching my own personal war against God. Other readers may glimpse themselves in these pages and think, "Oh, dear, I have been through that, just as she has! This all sounds familiar, and I thought I was the only one!"
 
The belief that I was the only one plagued me for years. There were times when I suspected that other people had gone to college to write term papers, study for exams, graduate, and get married, all the while obeying social conventions, saying their prayers, and paying their bills.
 
Then there was me. It is true that I went to college to get a series of degrees, but I did so by partying like a fiend and touting the virtues of nihilism. The T-shirt for my life would have echoed the words of Dostoyevsky: "If God is dead, then anything is possible." Of course, college days often are connected with rebellion, but my style of rebellion lasted over twenty years, and as a philosophy teacher, I was able to tempt others to join me.
 
I hope this book finds its way into the hands of others who were, or are, as nihilistic as I was, so they will know they are not alone and may realize that, no matter how deep the hole they have dug, there is always an escape route.

• From Catholicism to Radical Feminism and Back | An Interview with Lorraine V. Murray, author of Confessions of an Ex-Feminist

Comments

[LJ]

"Growing up in secular middle-class America, I understood sex as something disconnected from the idea of creating life."

This is the same popular thought process that is at the root of social acceptance of 'same-sex marriage.' It is really only the Catholic Church that is the hold-out against it. That 1930 Lambeth conference has a lot to answer for, not just for Anglicanism but for virtually all of Protestantism and perhaps, in some measure for the course of even the secular west. That, of course, doesn't excuse us, as Father Pavone regularly reminds us.

[Samuel Skinner]

You know this would fall under fallacy of arguing from consequences... not to mention their are atheists who took the exact opposite approach?

The Soviet Union is always a fun example- they were atheists and they cracked down on "sinful" behavior and Cuba rounds up gay people as deviants. You don't have to be a theist to have these attitudes- it simply helps!

As for sex disconnected from creating life... reminds me of Italy. I hear you can't get married if you are infertile there. God, I love consistancy.

[Dan]

Samuel Skinner:

You might want to check some of your facts before taking potshots. None of your claims of purported inconsistency have any factual basis.

There is a strong tie between Christian culture and anti-abortion attitudes and, conversely, between abortion and secular attitudes, those of communists included. All communist countries legalized abortion, well before it was legalized in the West. The West legalized abortion beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s as secularist philosophies took greater hold of Western culture.

What you say about what you "heard" concerning Italy convinces me that you are an atheist. Why? Because of the famous quote attributed to Chesterton: the problem with those who do not believe in God is not that they believe in nothing, but that they will believe anything.

[Telemachus]

"I realized in that moment that perfectly good, well-meaning people—people like me—can support gravely evil things because of the power of lies."
Truth. Same thing goes for Germany under the Nazi-regime I suppose. http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=1105

I think one of the keenest insights of this article is the following: that once one has to accept the fundamental idea that human life begins at conception, the whole of Catholic sexual doctrine falls right into place. As the denial of this fundamental idea is not easily done without falling back onto ideological thinking, Catholic sexual doctrine becomes very hard to argue against.

-------------------------------------------------------

Samuel Skinner:

What are you referring to when you say "You know this would fall under fallacy of arguing from consequences"? The whole article? The article as a whole is arguing that once you set aside "sexual liberation," one can't help but come to conclusions that discredit this ideology on the grounds of more fundamental understandings of the human person.

And that there were / are atheists that are against abortion... well, I'll leave the proof of that in your court. One look at the writings of, say, Daniel Dennett makes it pretty clear that atheism *logically* (and therefore universally) leads to absolutist materialism and the re-animalization of the human being. But even if you're right, there have been professed Catholics that did and believed terrible things despite Catholic teaching, but that didn't make their viewpoints "Catholic."

As for the rest of your post, I don't know what point you are trying to make except "You don't have to be Christian to be a 'good person.'" Well, I certainly hear that a lot, and used to think so too, but the understanding I have is that the remaining morality of Western civilization is simply vestigial at best. "Good people" aren't going to exist very much longer, and the remaining "goodness" of statist-charity and the like is just inertia from the Christian Era.

Well, let's just make laws to keep people from being "bad" then, right? Laws based on "what we can all agree on"? Fine. When an atheist writes a book or founds a movement that promotes the *absolute* sanctity of human life, I will gladly support him / her. I have no problem with atheists; what I have a problem with are anti-theist misanthropes who wish to disguise their ideologies as "science" to justify the mass slaughter of human beings. I'm not saying you *are* one of these people, but that's usually what we Catholics are talking about when we denounce national-socialism, communism, and all the other secular "-isms" out there that have done humanity so much harm.

[Ed Peters]

Skinner wrote: "... reminds me of Italy. I hear you can't get married if you are infertile there."

You heard wrong. 1983 CIC 1084.3