Posted on 07/03/2008 6:19:51 AM PDT by NYer
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.”
His remark made me realize that my pro-choice viewpoints had put me in the position of deciding whose lives were worth living, and even who was human. Along with doctors, the government and other abortion advocates, I decided where to draw this crucial line. When I would come across Catholic Web sites or books that asserted “Life begins at conception,” I would scoff, as was my habit, yet I found myself increasingly uncomfortable with my defense. I realized that my criteria for determining when human life begins were distressingly vague. I was putting the burden of proof on the fetuses to demonstrate to me that they were human, and I was a tough judge. I found myself looking the other way when I heard about things like the 3-D ultrasounds that showed fetuses touching their faces, smiling and opening their eyes at ages at which I still considered abortion acceptable. As modern technology revealed more and more evidence that fetuses were humans too, I would simply move the bar for what I considered human.
At some point I started to feel I was more determined to remain pro-choice than to analyze honestly who was and was not human. I started to see this phenomenon in others in the pro-choice community as well. As I researched issues like partial-birth abortion, I frequently became stunned to the point of feeling physically ill upon witnessing the level of evil that normal people can support. I could hardly believe my eyes when I read of reasonable, educated professionals calmly justifying infanticide by calling the victims fetuses instead of babies. It was then that I took a mental step back from the entire pro-choice movement. If this is what it meant to be pro-choice, I was not pro-choice.
Yet I still could not quite label myself pro-life.
I recognized that I too had probably told myself lies in order to maintain my support for abortion. Yet there was some tremendous pressure that kept me from objectively looking at the issue. Something deep within me screamed that not to allow women to have abortions, at least in the first trimester, would be unfair in the direst sense of the word. Even as I became religious, I mentally pushed aside thoughts that all humans might have God-given eternal souls worthy of dignity and respect. It became too tricky to figure out when we receive those souls, the most obvious answer being “at conception,” as opposed to some arbitrary point during gestation. It was not until I re-evaluated the societal views of sex that had permeated the consciousness of my peer group that I was able to release that internal pressure I felt and take an unflinching look at abortion.
Growing up in secular middle-class America, I understood sex as something disconnected from the idea of creating life. During my entire childhood I did not know anyone who had a baby sibling; and to the extent that neighborhood parents ever talked about pregnancy, it was to say they were glad they were “done.” In high school sex education class, we learned not that sex creates babies, but that unprotected sex creates babies. Even recently, before our marriage was blessed in the Catholic Church, my husband and I took a course about building good marriages. It was a video series by a nondenominational Christian group, and the segment called “Good Sex” did not mention children once. In all the talk about bonding and back rubs and intimacy and staying in shape, the closest the videos came to connecting sex to the creation of life was a brief note that couples should discuss the topic of contraception.
All my life, the message I had heard loud and clear was that sex was for pleasure and bonding, that its potential for creating life was purely tangential, almost to the point of being forgotten. This mind-set became the foundation of my views on abortion. Because I saw sex as being by default closed to the possibility of life, I thought of unplanned pregnancies as akin to being struck by lightning while walking down the street—something totally unpredictable and undeserved that happened to people living normal lives.
My pro-choice views (and I imagine those of many others) were motivated by loving concern: I just did not want women to have to suffer, to have to devalue themselves by dealing with unwanted pregnancies. Since it was an inherent part of my worldview that everyone except people with “hang-ups” eventually has sex, and that sex is, under normal circumstances, only about the relationship between the two people involved, I was lured into one of the oldest, biggest, most tempting lies in human history: the enemy is not human. Babies had become the enemy because of their tendency to pop up and ruin everything; and just as societies are tempted to dehumanize their fellow human beings on the other side of the line in wartime, so had I, and we as a society, dehumanized what we saw as the enemy of sex.
As I was reading up on the Catholic Church’s understanding of sex, marriage and contraception, everything changed. I had always assumed that Catholic teachings against birth control were outdated notions, even a thinly disguised attempt to oppress the faithful. What I found, however, was that these teachings expressed a fundamentally different understanding of sex. And once I discovered this, I never saw the world the same way again.
The way I had always seen it, the generally accepted view was that babies were burdens, except for a few times in life when everything might be perfect enough for a couple to see new life as a good thing. The Catholic view, I discovered, is that babies are blessings and that while it is fine to attempt to avoid pregnancy for serious reasons, if we go so far as to adopt a “contraceptive mentality”—feeling entitled to the pleasure of sex while loathing (and perhaps trying to forget all about) its life-giving properties—we not only fail to respect this most sacred of acts, but we begin to see new life as the enemy.
I came to see that our culture’s widespread use and acceptance of contraception meant that the “contraceptive mentality” toward sex was now the default attitude. As a society, we had come to take it for granted that we are entitled to the pleasurable and bonding aspects of sex even when we are opposed to the new life it might produce. The option of abstaining from the act that creates babies if we see children as a burden had been removed from our cultural lexicon. Even if it would be a huge crisis to become pregnant, we had a right to have sex anyway. If this were true—if it were morally acceptable for people to have sex even when they believed that a new baby could ruin their lives—then abortion, as I saw things, had to be O.K.
Ideally I would have taken an objective look at when human life begins and based my views on that alone, but the lie was just too tempting. I did not want to hear too much about heartbeats or souls or brain activity. Terminating pregnancies simply had to be acceptable, because carrying a baby to term and becoming a parent is a huge deal, and society had made it very clear that sex was not a huge deal. As long as I accepted the premise that engaging in sex with a contraceptive mentality was morally acceptable, I could not bring myself to consider that abortion might not be acceptable. It seemed inhumane to make women deal with life-altering consequences for an act that was not supposed to have life-altering consequences.
Given my background, the Catholic idea that we are always to treat the sexual act with awe and respect, so much so that we should simply abstain if we are opposed to its life-giving potential, was a revolutionary message. Being able to consider honestly when life begins, to open my heart and mind to the wonder and dignity of even the tiniest of my fellow human beings, was not fully possible for me until I understood the nature of the act that creates these little lives in the first place.
All of these thoughts had been percolating in my brain for a while, and I found myself increasingly in agreement with pro-life positions. Then one night I became officially, unapologetically pro-life. I was reading yet another account of the Greek societies in which newborn babies were abandoned to die, wondering how normal people could do something like that, and I felt a chill rush through me as I thought: I know how they did it.
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. From my own experience, I knew how the Greeks, the Romans and people in every other society could put themselves into a mental state where they could leave a newborn child to die. The very real pressures of life—“we can’t afford another baby,” “we can’t have any more girls,” “he wouldn’t have had a good life”—left them susceptible to the temptation to dehumanize other human beings. Though the circumstances were different, the same process had happened with me, with the pro-choice movement and with anyone else who has ever been tempted to dehumanize inconvenient people.
I suspect that as those Greek parents handed over their infants for someone to take away, they remarked on how very unlike their other children these little creatures were: they couldn’t talk, the couldn’t sit up, and surely those little yawns and smiles were just involuntary reactions. I bet they referred to these babies with different words than they used to refer to the children they kept. Maybe they called them something like “fetuses.”
You think that more people would stop and think, “Hey, maybe the other side is on to something! They look happy, they seem happy. I’d like to try that out and see what I’m missing.”
I laud Jennifer conversion journey and the decisions she made along the way.
May God continue to bless her and her family.
You are so gonna get it, missy!
BTW, great article!
The only people who ever go that direction are politicians looking for votes. Once you realize that a fetus IS SO a REAL BABY, you can't un-know that. I made that trip right after Columbine, when I realized that those nutty pro-lifers were right - abortion is cheapening the value of all life in our society.
Wow, thanks for posting. That was a bit enlightening for me, actually.
When you do hear pro-life to pro-choice stories, it’s usually young women who just got to college and say, “I was raised in a backwards religious family and bought into it until I came to this liberal college.” It’s pretty boring, and doesn’t have nearly as much emotion or thought behind it.
I guarantee you, these women know better. They haven’t changed their views. They have abortions despite this anyway. Many live to regret their decisions in what is known as Post-Abortion Stress Syndrome. They’ll try to justify their actions by saying that they were young and didn’t know any better. But they are living for today and the guilt sets in big time later on, especially if they have children in the future.
Someone needs to use Hussein’s words against him. Yesterday he made a speech and said that fatherhood begins at conception. Someone needs to ask him how this can be since he says it is okay to destroy life after conception. Cannot have it both ways.
The media lets him and the worshippers don’t really pay attention anyway.
We're discussing life issues here.
This just might be something on which we actually agree.
A truly remarkable story, and a more capable defense of Pro-Life positions than I have heard from many lifelong believers.
>> Jennifer Fulwiler is a Web developer who lives in Austin, Tex., with her husband and three children.
Made all the more remarkable that she came to this realization in Texas’s version of San Francisco ... the lone bastion of complete lunacy in the Great State of Texas.
H
>> It’s amazing how you read more stories about the other side coming over to our side than you do the other way around.
Good observation — but not really that amazing when you think about it. It is extremely unlikely that a believer is going to have an epiphany that the unborn actually aren’t as human as they originally thought.
It is far more likely that, after some deep soul searching, an abortion advocate would have a “light-bulb moment” about the humanity of the unborn and the true brutality of abortion.
The history of humans deciding whom is, and is not, human is long and sad — chattel slavery, the Holocaust, abortion and Jihad have all emerged from groups of people determining that other people aren’t fully human and aren’t deserving of the inherent rights bestowed on humanity.
H
That’s because women who transition from pro life to pro abortion aren’t particularly proud of their transformation,
I know a couple of self described pro life women who panicked with an unexpected pregnancy and ended the pregnancies, one was even enabled in the decision making process by her ‘fiercely’ pro life mother.
So there you go. When someone’s back is to the wall, there’s no telling what they might do.
+1
You’re talking common sense here. When we are talking about the other side, common sense doesn’t necessarily enter into the picture.
>> You’re talking common sense here. When we are talking about the other side, common sense doesn’t necessarily enter into the picture.
True enough, particularly when we’re talking about feminist ideologues. But, I tend to have more faith in Americans than that. Logic doesn’t affect ideologues, but it does affect red-blooded Americans who simply “logically” disagree with us, like the author of the article above. Americans can be reached with logical arguments — even on abortion.
As for radical feminist ideologues — those that Limbaugh calls “feminazis” — those to whom abortion is not only acceptable, but an inherent good ... they cannot be reached. They must simply be used as examples of the truly callous nature of the pro-abortion movement.
They can also be a source of true amusement — read the blogs at “feministing.com” or “iblamethepatriarchy.com” sometime. Truly hilarious. They are complete wackos, so blinded by arguments of the “patriarchy” and narcissistically focused on their own miserable lives that they cannot even see how minuscule a minority they truly are. My reactions tend to range from amusement to pity when reading that nonsense — as they are truly miserable women, living in constant paranoid fear of the “patriarchy”. I cannot seem to manage actual anger at such an inconsequentially small ideology.
H
And there it is again! Just yesterday something like this started about the Padra Pio post. Why do some people get so much joy in battling all the time? We should be building up the Army of God with the holy spirit as our weapon. There will always be differences between us,at least until Jesus comes back. But we have real evil in this world,such as abortion,and once again someone finds a way to start battling one another.We must celebrate that those who chose death,now choose life. Jesus gave us eternal life from the womb,let us celebrate the triumph of good over evil! Blessed is the fruit of thy womb,Jesus.
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