Pro-life atheists

I love 'em.

I'd like to be able to say that when I was an atheist I had the intellectual integrity to be pro-life, but I didn't. Nope. I was driven to Christ by a number of things, but I didn't get my pro-life priorities into place until my faith forced me to do so. Atticus, on the other hand -- now there's intellectual integrity. He saw, long before he would seriously examine the Catholic Church, that the pro-choice wool had been pulled over his eyes. His pro-life conversion came before Jesus swept in to do the final clean-up.

As I'm up too late tonight, reading Mark Shea and Jimmy Akin, I'm struck by their posts on a couple of pro-life atheists. I've admired Nat Hentoff for a long time, and today Jimmy Akin had a link to a Hentoff editorial in which Hentoff describes the scene at a friend's dinner table. A nine-year-old boy, upon learning what an abortion is, tells his (abortionist) mother that the procedure, no matter when it's done, means, "killing the babies." Well, yeah. It does. He sees it. Will his mother? I hope and pray that she will be wrestling with her son's words. It will be painful ... like ripping into a part of herself, wrenching that part inside out, and scouring it clean with the roughest of tools. Truth has a way of leaving one raw. Let's pray she's willing to pay that price, and that her son has set her on a salvific path.

The other link, at Catholic and Enjoying It, was about the Raving Atheist. Let's pray for him, too.