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How to Talk to Teens about Abortion

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“The youth.” How do we reach them? What are they thinking? Who is influencing them? How do we get them off their phones and actually doing something? 

Maybe it’s because I’m barely 5’1” and look a lot younger than I am, but the number of times I’ve been asked some variation of “How do we reach the youth?” is…literally every time I do a Q&A with an audience over the age of 50. To a lot of adults, it feels like a big impossible mystery.

6–8 minutes

I just got home from speaking at the Michigan District of the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church High School gathering. That audience was not over the age of 50—about 800 high school students descended upon Mackinac Island (a gorgeous place for a speaking trip, by the way!) for four days of talks, fellowship, prayer, and growing in their faith. I spent four days “reaching” the exact demographic I’m most frequently asked about, and I’m going to be honest with you: it’s actually not that mysterious. 

I am a firm believer that high school students want nothing more than to be treated like adults. There are definitely parts of being an adult they don’t want; they don’t want to deal with taxes or insurance companies any more than actual adults do.  But high school students want to be respected, in a way that adults often respect other adults—and often don’t respect them.

Adults are taken seriously. 

Adults have a say in how the world works. 

Adults get to have their own thoughts and opinions and run their own lives. 

Adults are valued for their knowledge and experience; nobody writes them off because they’re “too young and naive” to know anything about the real world.

I believe that when high school students are treated like they have valuable experience, like their thoughts matter, and like they can handle challenging concepts and controversial conversations, they rise to the occasion. 

I gave that exact invitation on stage to 800 high school students last Sunday night—to come talk about abortion with me in a real way. I invited them to dive headlong with me into the smartest pro-choice arguments and the smartest pro-life arguments that exist and assured them that we wouldn’t be avoiding the tough questions. I told them that I believe our society can have real, deep conversations about abortion without the sky falling and everyone hating each other, and that I would show them how. Because I believe they can do it—not just that society in general can, but that they personally can. 

Monday morning, my speech was standing room only. 

Tuesday morning, my speech was full too.

Tuesday night, my Q&A session lasted from 9:00pm to 11:00pm—a full hour and 15 minutes longer than it was supposed to—because so many students came with honest questions and an open mind. 

And this isn’t an anomaly. Every single time I’m in front of a room of high school students and I invite them to talk about something real and serious with me, they rise to the occasion. 

The pre-course survey for our high school curriculum, Equipped for Life Academy, has found the same thing. Most students haven’t had the chance to engage with the issue of abortion in any meaningful way, especially not with an adult there to guide the discussion. The media, adults, and organizations in their lives have told them what to believe, sure, but actually engaging with the topic? 41% of students say they’ve “never really engaged with the issue of abortion before” going through our curriculum in their school or church. For the rest of them, their “engagement” mostly involved “hearing about abortion in the news sometimes” and “discussing it with friends sometimes.”

And when they’re given the opportunity to actually engage head on, they love it. They packed my speech until it was standing room only. In that same Equipped for Life Academy pre-survey, 79% of students expressed they are “positive” or “fine with” learning about abortion in class. Only 5% are actively reluctant or opposed. 

I think a huge reason why teachers, pastors, and youth leaders are reluctant to invite students into deep conversations about controversial topics is because they’re afraid that that “actively reluctant or opposed” group is the majority—when it’s actually just 5%. They don’t realize that students are not only willing, but itching to talk about something real. 

Were you ever that high school student asking “when am I ever going to use calculus in real life?!” You didn’t necessarily hate school; you just craved the real world. Today’s high schoolers are the same, and there are few topics that feel more real-world relevant to them than abortion.

Take the Catholic Diocese of Lansing, Michigan.

The Diocese purchased our Equipped for Life Academy curriculum for two Catholic high schools thanks to a generous grant from a local right to life chapter—Plymouth County Right to Life. The plan was to teach the entire 15-lesson sequence over the course of four years, covering three or four lessons with each grade level. Originally, the schools planned to phase it in gradually: just freshmen the first year, freshmen and sophomores the second year, etc, until all four grade levels were learning their respective lessons four years from now. But when the teachers got their hands on the lesson plans, one school’s staff decided it was so important that they redid their curriculum planning for the whole year to make time for every single student to use Equipped for Life Academy. Letting the next three graduating classes go by without discussing abortion with them just wasn’t an acceptable option anymore—not once they’d seen the impact this could have. 

And their students were thrilled.

“I’m excited because I know I don’t know everything about [abortion], so if I can learn more I would feel a lot better in my opinion.” ~17 year old in Mr. I’s class

“I think it is a good thing for students to discuss controversial topics so that they can form their views of it in a controlled environment before they go into the real world.” ~ 18 year old in Mrs. L’s class

“I am glad that we get to learn in a space where my views are not judged or held against me. I am also glad we get to be educated in this matter that will help the world be a better place as we grow and mature into adults and leaders of society.” ~ 15 year old in Ms. M’s class

“I am very grateful for the opportunity to be able to go to a school that does this. It is very good to learn about [controversial] topics.” ~ 18 year old in Mr. I’s class

And that wasn’t just the sentiment from students who were already pro-life. When students begin using our curriculum, 39.1% do not identify as pro-life—including 24.4% who are unsure and 14.7% who identify as pro-choice. Let me say that again: 39.1% do not identify as pro-life, but only 5% are actively reluctant or opposed to learning about abortion in class.

So how do we reach the youth about abortion?

Actually invite them in. Trust me, they’re craving it. Invite them to think in a real, deep way. Don’t tell them what to believe, and don’t shy away from the hardest questions and emotional moments. Give them space to share their honest opinions and process complex feelings alongside you. Walk together as you explore the smartest arguments on all sides and see how they stack up. If the pro-life position is true, and I’m awfully sure that it is, then that’s what students will come to see too.

That’s what our curriculum is designed to do, and I firmly believe that you can do it with your youth too. 

The post “How to Talk to Teens About Abortion” originally appeared at the Equal Rights Institute blog. Subscribe to our email list with the form below and get a FREE gift. Click here to learn more about our pro-life apologetics course, “Equipped for Life: A Fresh Approach to Conversations About Abortion.”

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Is Empathy Toxic?

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It was 2020 (that dumpster fire of a year!) and I was extolling the importance of empathy in a conversation with a friend. I was shocked when he pushed back, calling the term “woke” and “politically correct.” It was the first time I learned that some people view empathy as a dirty word. When I asked what word he’d prefer, he said, “sympathy,” and then he tried to make the case that this was a more “biblical” word.

Confused, I also couldn’t suppress an internal eyeroll, but I decided to get curious. It helped that my friend and I had a lot of respect for each other. 

And so, although it took some effort, we both decided to pause, check our reactions, and listen. Good questions followed that helped us unpack how we were defining our terms, as well as the experiences that were fueling our perspectives. In the end, because we both chose to be curious rather than dismissive, we learned a few things. For one thing, we discovered that we were using two completely different definitions of the word “empathy.”

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Two Different Definitions

For me, defining “empathy” was simple and essential. Empathy is feeling another person’s pain, walking a mile in their shoes. I spent a good bit of my career with National Fatherhood Initiative writing curricula that held up self-awareness and empathy as two of the most foundational qualities for being a healthy human. Without them, it was impossible to grow. For example, here’s some of the content and questions we used to communicate the concept of empathy to incarcerated fathers:

Empathy is being able to feel and understand another’s situation and feelings. A key mark of maturity is being able to take responsibility for ways you have hurt your family. You must understand how your behavior affected, affects, or will affect each family member. The following exercise is difficult but will help you do this. Don’t be tempted to rush through it. Feeling your family’s pain [empathy] will help you change from the inside out. Do your best to put yourself in the shoes of each family member and write out answers to the following questions.

Be as honest as you can:

  • How did my behavior prior to incarceration affect my spouse, children, and/or extended family?
  • What would they remember about how I behaved?
  • How could my past behavior still be affecting them today?
  • How did my arrest and trial affect my family?
  • How do they explain my absence?
  • What has changed in my family since I went to prison?
  • What is it like for them to visit me (e.g. waiting in line, getting searched, etc.)?
  • What do they sacrifice in order to visit me?1

My friend resonated with this definition and the examples, and we discovered he was coming from a totally different reference point. He saw empathy in the current cultural climate being used to say something like, “If you haven’t experienced exactly what someone else has, you have nothing valuable to offer.” For example, someone might say, “Unless you’ve shared in the black experience, you have no part in the conversation.” I acknowledged his point, and we both realized our definitions of empathy were radically different. I fully agreed that you don’t have to have gone through the same experience as another person to help them. Or, said differently, you don’t have to have shared the same life experience as someone to offer wisdom or valuable expertise. For example, must an oncologist have gone through cancer herself to treat cancer patients effectively? Of course not. She just needs to be a good doctor.

Six years after that conversation with my friend, many of us are still talking past each other—me included. For example, when I heard that Allie Beth Stuckey’s Toxic Empathy was a national bestseller, my first instinct was the familiar eye roll.

My definitions and experiences kicked in and I quickly judged her book by its cover. Disgusted, I began to rehearse my mantra: Viewing a basic virtue like empathy as toxic produces a distorted humanity. It contributes to a system that cranks out arrogant culture warriors who don’t listen or give thought to other people’s stories. It shoves aside love and compassion to make room for dehumanization and “owning the libs.” Except…

This is not what Stuckey is saying. I don’t agree with her on everything, but as I found out when I tried to be an honest broker and actually listen to her audiobook on a recent trip, she clearly states that “this book isn’t about killing empathy; it’s about submitting our empathy to God’s definitions of love, goodness, and justice.”

In acknowledging that I misjudged Stuckey, I remain undeterred in showing all who will listen that empathy is not a dirty word. But, again, my journey has taught me that empathy needs nuance, because it can be distorted and misunderstood. 

Empathy Needs Honesty

And this brings me to one more important insight. Although empathy is an essential starting place, it is not a final destination. In other words, empathy by itself is not the be-all and end-all; it is just one vital step on the way to courageous, just, and loving action.

This is something Arthur Brooks articulated well in a recent leadership podcast with Andy Stanley. He asked, “What does it mean to be compassionate?” and gave four steps:

  • Understanding the problem at hand.
  • Feeling the pain of the affected people enough to know why you have to act. [Brooks defines this step as empathy—notice how it’s just step two out of a four-step process.
  • Having the capacity and intellect to know what needs to be done.
  • Having the courage to get it done.

He then offered this brilliant insight:

Empathy [by itself] will hamstring you… if all you have is the pain of somebody who’s going to be affected, you won’t be able to fire anybody if you need to. You won’t be able to give somebody a hard truth. You won’t be able to say to your spouse, “I don’t like how this is working here. We need to change this.” Honesty is a form of love, and the problem is that if all you have is empathy, then honesty very often falls to the wayside.

Two Opposite Errors

When it comes to talking about abortion, I think we’re all swimming in cultural waters that pull us toward one extreme or another: viewing empathy as toxic or viewing empathy as the end game.

Wrongly seeing empathy as toxic can look like not caring about or trying to understand the perspectives of people we disagree with. It can also look like misrepresenting and dehumanizing them with memes on social media. And the opposite error—viewing empathy as the endgame—can hamstring us from expressing our true thoughts and feelings or make us so concerned with listening well that we don’t speak up on behalf of the voiceless and most vulnerable.

You can probably guess from what I’ve said already, but of those two errors I’m more prone to the second one—I can listen and empathize so much that I don’t make a pro-life argument often enough. I hate cancel culture, and it’s not hard for me to humanize people I disagree with, even about really important things. But I’m still growing in, as Albert Brooks says, “having the courage to get it done.” I don’t want my silence to unwittingly contribute to continued massive human rights violations against those in the abortion conversation with the least agency—unborn babies. And so I’m continuing to learn to speak out in classy ways on behalf of those whose lives hang in the balance and who also deserve our empathy. 

We need to avoid both honesty that’s missing empathy and empathy that’s missing honesty. We need to watch out for both errors, but most people lean more toward one than the other, and it can be helpful to know which one you personally are more prone to. I tend toward the second one—how about you?

  1. Inside Out Dad Christian Fathering Handbook (National Fatherhood Initiative, 2008). ↩︎

The post Is Empathy Toxic? originally appeared at the Equal Rights Institute blog. Subscribe to our email list with the form below and get a FREE gift. Click here to learn more about our pro-life apologetics course, “Equipped for Life: A Fresh Approach to Conversations About Abortion.”  

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How to Talk to Pro-Lifers – Part 2

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Have you ever wondered what it would be like if there were a pro-choice version of ERI that taught pro-choice advocates how to effectively talk to pro-lifers? In Part 2 of “How to Talk to Pro-Lifers,” Josh Brahm and Emily Geiger live react to three more TikToks where pro-choice advocates explain to their fellow pro-choicers which strategies they think are (and aren’t) effective when talking to pro-life people.

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Jim-Bob the Barber and Arguing for the Obvious

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The tiny town of Russell is so small that it only has one barber, a man named Jim-Bob. Since Jim-Bob is the only barber around, he shaves all the men in town who don’t shave themselves. And of course it would be silly to shave a man who already shaves himself, so the only people Jim-Bob shaves are the men in town who don’t shave themselves. Sounds reasonable, right? Wrong. In fact, it’s logically impossible. Jim-Bob literally cannot operate that way, because the concept is nonsense, like the concept of a married bachelor.

Unless you’ve heard of the Bachelor Paradox before (or you happen to have an extremely nerdy philosophy brain), you’re probably confused at this point. My explanation of how Jim-Bob operates sounds perfectly coherent and non-contradictory—why on earth is it nonsense? 

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

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Congratulations Dr. Carlson!

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Last week, I had the privilege of watching Rebecca successfully defend her dissertation in front of an audience of peers, supporters, and of course, the committee of expert faculty who came prepared to test her with big, complicated questions. Her committee grilled her for an hour and a half, recessed to deliberate for 30 seconds, and then came back in and said, “Congratulations, Dr. Carlson!” She passed with no revisions and graduated two days ago, making her one of the only people with a PhD in philosophy who works full-time in the pro-life movement.