Pro-Choice and Vegetarian: A Study in Intellectual Inconsistency

Came across this article from the National Catholic Register and found it quite compelling. The writer, a former pro-choice vegetarian, gets to the bottom of the intellectual inconsistency in the Leftist view that abortion is a basic human right, while the killing of animals is barbaric. I have often wondered how the hell a person can hold such blatantly conflicting convictions. Thanks to this article by Jennifer Fulwiler, I understand it much better now.

The way I used to see it, all life is just chemical reactions, no one type of life any more inherently special than the next. In this view, the only reason that a human being would be considered more valuable than, say, a squirrel is because the human has higher levels of intelligence and consciousness than his furry friend.

On my spectrum of worthiness of life, adult humans were on the far right side; fetuses were on the left. Unborn humans were somewhere around shrimp and worms in terms of value, because they could not display any intelligence. And so it seemed unfair to ask women to turn their lives upside down for a lifeform that had all the value of a crustacean.

….

She goes on to explain how she began to feel more and more discomfort with her professors and classmates in university who expressed extreme far Left anti-Life ideas, such as euthanizing mentally disabled people. Yet, Jennifer was unable to properly debate these ideas because she realized her own view of what does and does not constitute value was also warped. It wasn’t until she began to explore Catholic teaching on the issue of dignity that she came to change her views.

 

Here is also a great blog post by another former pro-abortion advocate who took an intellectual and spiritual turn in the right direction. She also came to her conversion through an intellectual process while confronted by gruesome Leftist views in her unviversity classroom.

 

So I found myself in a state of cold shock and disbelief that I was reading of people — not just fringe crazies, but the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and some Supreme Court Justices — casually speak about the inconvenience of the skulls and bone fragments of dismembered babies (“fetuses”) the same age as those babies in the NICU. The horrors continued when I read Gonzales v. Carhart [some excerpts here...warning: no photos, but the descriptions are extremely disturbing].It took my breath away to witness the level of evil that normal people can fall into supporting. They were talking about infanticide, but completely refused to label it as such. It was when I considered that these were educated, reasonable professionals who were probably not bad people that I realized that evil always works through lies. I also 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.