Janet Smith on How She Became a Defender of Humanae Vitae

I was in high school I was graduated in highschool 1968 when humanity came out and I have to admit I had no awareness of it all and all that it was happening I was raised as what you might call a casual Catholic you know we would go to Mass on Sunday say grace at Sunday meal but that was that was about it when I went off to college I thought religion was just something he left behind and for probably no more than two years maybe less than that I didn't go to church but an amazing impactful event in my life was when some women came to Grinnell College in Iowa where I was a student and they were trying to get us to write letters to legalize abortion and I honestly I was 19 years of age and I had never heard of abortion so I went to the library and I looked it up on the way to the meeting and I read what it was and I just couldn't believe women would do that to themselves and it said in this article that the Catholic Church was opposed to abortion I was very open-minded honestly about the whole thing but it just seemed to me to be I always loved babies my mother had two babies when I was a young teenager I had just become besotted with babies and I went to this meeting and I have to admit I was doing my best just as everybody else on campus was joining us to look like John Lennon and I actually looked very much like John Lennon I hadn't got it all together and I sat at this meeting and again the most sublime innocence in the world I raised my hand and I said I'm writing I'm willing to write letters to support abortion but I just need to know when you think human life begins absolutely honest question and they just started booing and shouting and saying we don't need your kind here we don't need you right to lifers here then I'm sitting there saying my kinda I I'm again I look like John Lennon just like everybody else in the room does so what distinguishes me from the rest of them well that was I really felt like I got you know hit over the head with a rock at that point and just started thinking deeply about things like why people were indifferent to the question about when human life began and why the Catholic Church had been has always been opposed to abortion and I just thought about and people on campus kept coming up to me and they like look like everybody else they sort of you know like you're not weird or anything John Lennon just like the rest of us and why are you opposed to abortion you know I'd say well I don't know that I am but you know these are these are questions that need to be considered so after you know maybe a month or two I was very posed to abortion that stayed sort of steady state for a couple years I started going back to church I never thought about contraception until I went to Toronto where as a graduate student in classical languages and I decided I talked to our another graduate of Grinnell College who was a professor there in Toronto and he said well if you're really opposed to abortion you should join the right-to-life movement like Ann I hadn't heard of the right-to-life movement since that incident in 1969 or so and I I went right on my bike and went downtown Toronto and to the right-to-life offices I don't want to sign up and they said what can you do I said I have no idea but I'm going to be a teacher so maybe I should make presentations so I started making presentations in a lot almost every week for a period of time in the high schools of Toronto and using the old Wilke slides for abortion and I would often get the question but what about contraception and I would always say oh it's a completely different issue a completely different issue but then I met a young group of people as students also at the University who all of us had come back to our Catholic faith summer conference and we all would decide we needed to know about our faith because people would start challenging us we're Catholic do you really think women shouldn't be precinct and really accept the Church's teaching on contraception so we decided we needed to study these matters so we had a we had a right to life group we had a commis Aquinas reading group we had a Vatican pure reading group and we had a Humana vitae reading group so by the end of the time we read him on a BT we were all convinced that the Church's teaching was true fast-forward another couple years I'm at the University of Notre Dame my first job and I'm again got involved in right to life and I started doing counselling outside of abortion clinics I'd see all these young girls coming down in fact the Planned Parenthood was a couple blocks past the abortion clinic and these key roles would think this was planned parent I said no this is the abortion thing said well we're looking for Planned Parenthood and I said we better pay attention because this is abortion clinic and this will probably end up before long ago mmm and so I started getting it I mean it just seems so clear to me that contraception led to abortion I just had this epiphany you know and I thought wow and so I started doing and this is actually at the same time that John Paul the second theology the body was coming out in spurts every Wednesday and I had a colleague a young graduate student who would feed me the latest of looser Vettori romano printouts of the theology of the body and I'd read those than I teach them to students like a week later and students were really buying it it made sense to them it made sense to me so I started getting invitations to do speaking engagements on all sorts of things so I started doing it only on him on TV because nobody else was and I said you know there's lots of people who are against abortion but nobody's else is doing defend human even a thing so that's how it came about

Channel: Convinced Catholic

Views: 798

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Catholic, Janet Smith, Humanae Vitae

Id: bdWi-L2IbXY

Length: 5min 35sec (335 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 07 2019