From a pro-choice nun:
“Every woman has a free will. God gave us free will… That’s what separates us from the beasts. Free will is guided by conscience, and conscience is formed not by dogma, what organized religions tell us, but by experience. A woman will answer to God for one thing: Has she followed her conscience in carrying out God’s will? It’s nobody’s right to tell her what her conscience said to her. That’s what men want to take from us… the right to follow our own conscience.”
Sister Margaret Ellen Traxler quoted in Anna Bonavoglia The Choices We Made: 25 Women and Men Speak out about Abortion (New York: Random House, 1991) 64
This nun is wrong about free will and conscience. She is basing herself on relativism.
Conscience must be formed. That means we have to learn what God wants us to do, and he has told us through the natural law, through the Ten Commandments, and through the Church that Jesus himself established.
Basically, with this nun’s argument, anything could be justified. Hitler could use this argument to say that he was only following his conscience, because in his experience Jews were worth nothing but should be killed. This is where the slippery slope leads to. This poor nun is seriously misguided. When you hear arguments like this, ask yourself: couldn’t the latest murderer, rapist, or robber use the same argument? Morality depends on more than our experience.