Aimee Murphy is the founder and executive director of Rehumanize International, a non-sectarian organization that advocates against “all forms of aggressive violence.” Ms. Murphy considers herself a queer, pro-life feminist. She does not believe that those three things represent a contradiction in terms.
But reaching that understanding was not easy, she told Sebastian Gomes, an executive editor at America and host of its new podcast Voting Catholic. Ms. Murphy’s change of heart came as a result of a traumatic experience during her high school years when she was raped and assaulted by someone she had been in a relationship with.
“I wasn’t eating, and I wasn’t sleeping, and I didn’t feel like I had support at all.”
“March went by. April came. I still hadn’t had a period,” she said. That was when Ms. Murphy began to worry that she might have gotten pregnant by her rapist. “I was a straight-A student. I was the starter on the J.V. basketball team. And all of my teachers were saying that I was Ivy League material. So, the idea of having a baby just really threw me for a loop.”
“Abortion was really the only thing that was on my mind,” Ms. Murphy said. “I was a feminist. I was an atheist. I was queer. In the California culture I was in, it was just a given that if you were a feminist and if you cared about human rights that you were going to support abortion, support a woman’s right to choose.”
But Ms. Murphy found that things were not that simple, and her stance on abortion “withered within the space of a few terrifyingly long days in April.”
“It was in that moment when my own life was threatened that I realized that I couldn’t take part in this ongoing cycle of violence and oppression."
“The guy who raped me pulled me out of my architectural drafting class one day,” she said. “He said: ‘Aimee, if you need to get an abortion, I’ll drive you. I’ll pay for it, but you need to get it taken care of.’ He said he didn’t want his mom to find out what happened. I laughed incredulously and scoffed. And then he said, ‘Aimee, if you don’t get an abortion, I’m thinking that I might kill you.’”
When she went back to class, her heart was racing, but something else also clicked for her in that moment. She came to the realization that because she was an inconvenience to him, her rapist was prepared to kill her.
“I realized, what right do I have to do that same exact thing to another human being?” Ms. Murphy explained. “It was in that moment when my own life was threatened that I realized that I couldn’t take part in this ongoing cycle of violence and oppression. I became very begrudgingly pro-life.”
Though Ms. Murphy’s pregnancy test eventually turned out to be negative, her experience changed her life’s path. This is why she began Rehumanize International, to promote the cause of a “consistent life ethic.”
She advocates against not only abortion but the death penalty, unjust wars, domestic violence and other sources of aggressive violence. She also found herself going back to her Catholic faith, something that she thought she had abandoned in her teenage years.
“We as consistent-life-ethic Catholics are really put between a rock and a hard place when it comes to politics,” she said.
Ms. Murphy finds herself dissatisfied with both Democrats and Republicans. Democrats, she explained, stand for the rights of immigrants, the least among us. But they also “support violence against the literal littlest of guys” in the form of unborn babies and are also for expanding access to assisted suicide. Republicans, meanwhile, are for the death penalty, “dismember families” at the border and support war-making.
“I think it really is an indictment of the Catholic Church in the United States that we seem to look more like the polarized culture than a real reflection of this broad and holistic framework of Catholic social teaching,” she said. “It’s just a false binary.”
For those who seek to more closely follow Catholic social teaching, Ms. Murphy said, it is very difficult to distinguish between who to vote for and who not to vote for.
“Ultimately, I think people do have to vote their conscience,” she said. “Even Pope Benedict said that, given ample reason, as long as someone isn’t voting for a candidate because of their support for violence then there’s a more nuanced take on how we can vote.”
To hear more of Ms. Murphy’s story and for a deeper look at how American Catholics view abortion, be sure to listen to Voting Catholic, a new podcast by America Media that helps Catholics discern how to vote in the 2020 presidential election.
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