What about abortion? Is there an atheist view on abortion? The seventh letter in Mary Eberstadt’s new book, The Loser Letters , examines this question among the new atheists, but it is chps 8 and 9 that pull this into a cohesive, searing story.

Here’s the big picture. Chps 8 and 9 describe how it is that A.F. Christian (A Former Christian) made the official move from a Dull (Christian believer) to a Bright (Atheist). 

A.F. Christian is living with “leechosaurus” boyfriend, Lobo, in Portland, and she is learning to see that the official slippery slope is actually slippery. Once you see that infanticide is normal in history from Stephen Pinker, and from Peter Singer that moral codes that separate animals from human are actually inseparable, and then from Pinker than human “dignity” is actually “stupidity,” you see morals fall apart. Instead of driving her away from atheism, this attracted her. Why?

Because she was pregnant and miserable and a drug addict. Not sure if Eberstadt intended this, but it appears to me she’s saying that decisions to abandon the morals of Christianity often come on the cusp of an irresistible moral decision. That is, the person wants to do something thought wrong and atheism enables the decision.

Anyway, the 9th chp then tells her story of an abortion and the awful, awful world into which it sent her, but she troops along as an atheist.

The logic of A.F. Christian’s moral collapse is like this:

If we are just animate fungus … nothing behind us and nothing ahead of us …if the poets and aesthetes are all wrong about beauty pointing toward Something/Someone More … if no one is watching or caring … then one decision to abort is nothing at all. (See p. 122.)