Eight Responses to the Pro-Choice Mindset

Jennifer Fulwiler has written a good article in InsideCatholic.com that is a worthwhile read. It begins:

I once said that I'd die to keep abortion legal and easily accessible, and I meant it. I was vehemently pro-choice, as were most of the women in my social circles. We believed abortion was a critical right for women and could not imagine how anyone could be pro-life. We were products of a culture in which human sexuality had been severed from its inherent connection to the creation of human life. Our generation had been taught in our public school sex-ed classes not that sex creates babies, but that unprotected sex creates babies. We were assured that the creation of new human life was tangential to sexual activity, something that was not only optional but completely controllable. In fact, babies were considered downright antithetical to sex.

 

In my life as a young adult I knew many women who had abortions, and in every case their attitudes regarding their pregnancies were ultimately the same: "I didn't sign up for this." Society had assured them that sex did not have to have life-altering consequences, and their unplanned pregnancies came as unwelcome surprises. In this panicked frame of mind they -- and those of us who supported them -- were susceptible to the pro-abortion message that their babies were nothing more than "tissue," that abortion was merely "pregnancy termination" and not the taking of a human life.

 

After a religious conversion that led me to the Catholic Church, I began to rethink my pro-choice position. Specifically, the Church's teaching on human sexuality reshaped my worldview in such a radical way that, for the first time, I was able to take an honest look at what abortion really is. The Church's teaching that sex intrinsically contains the possibility of creating new human life released the pressure that the contraceptive mentality had put on me to see babies as enemies. Once I saw abortion for what it was, I could hardly believe that I ever supported such a procedure. It is a testament to the power of the contraceptive mentality that for so many years I managed to ignore the reality of my beliefs.

 

Below are eight statements that I believed when I was in favor of abortion, along with suggestions for how you might respond to those who hold similar views. And remember: Most people who favor abortion need to re-think human sexuality before they can be in a mindset to really "hear" the arguments against abortion....

Read the rest here.