I am sad to announce the resignation of Rachel Crawford as Director of Training, which becomes effective on July 24th, 2020. Rachel would like to thank all of our followers who support our work and have helped to bring our message to pro-life individuals who benefit from our content. She is excited to see what God has planned for her next!

Rachel had big shoes to fill when she stepped into Timothy Brahm’s position as Director of Training. Looking back at her work in the last year, it is clear to me that she not only filled those shoes well, she far exceeded my expectations. I think the best compliment a manager can give to a resigning employee is, “I would hire you again in a heartbeat.” And I can definitely say that about Rachel. She did great work, and she is always welcome back.

One of Rachel’s greatest accomplishments since then was completing the writing for the advanced extension added to the Equipped for Life Course with Andrew Kaake. The Philosophy Team had been working on this module for years, and there were some major problems yet to solve, but they did and we were able to film and publish them last year.

Another of Rachel’s achievements was her work on the content for the Sidewalk Counseling Masterclass, including spearheading the writing of the 45-page workbook. She felt it was critical for our students to get all of the tips out of the course, and given that Jacob often trains through storytelling, we wanted to do the work of cultivating those key lessons and practical tips for our students. The result is a very professional workbook that the sidewalk counselors who have taken our course love! The workbook contains 46 practical tips, FAQs about the material covered in the lessons, easy to follow step-by-step instructions, and organized notes.

Finally, the “Abortion as Self-Defense” video and article Rachel just published are the culmination of several years of brainstorming among our Philosophy Team. While pro-life apologists have responded before to simpler versions of this argument, we hadn’t seen anyone adequately respond to the more advanced versions, partially because pro-choice people rarely communicate them clearly. In fact, our Philosophy Team created stronger versions of this pro-choice argument during their early discussions than they had even heard any pro-choice advocate make! Given how involved Rachel was in solving the problems with this pro-choice argument, I’m so glad that she determined to finish this huge project (and every other unfinished Philosophy Team project) before stepping down. I really think of the “Abortion as Self-Defense” project as Rachel’s swan song.

Here are some links to Rachel’s other best articles, videos, and podcasts. If you had missed any of these, I’d encourage you to check them out!

Articles:

• Arguing From Equality: The Personhood of Human Embryos
• “Abortion is Healthcare”: A Misogynistic Non-Argument
• Refuting Pro-Choice Memes
• Stop Using “Trust Women” as an Abortion Trump Card

Videos:

• Responding to the Question of Rape
• Pro-Life Apologetics: The Equal Rights Argument (Rachel wrote this script)

Podcasts:

• Humor in Dialogue
• Our Take on the “AKA Jane Roe” Documentary

On behalf of myself, our board, and our staff, I wish Rachel the very best in her new endeavors.

While Rachel’s contributions will be missed, ERI will continue to be a strong organization for the future. Andrew Kaake continues to demonstrate his value to ERI in his writing and research.

I have also already found a great replacement for Rachel, in Emily Albrecht, the co-president of St. Olaf Students for Life! (You may have seen her in the awesome video below. If not, check it out!) I couldn’t be more excited about her! In the weeks following Rachel’s announcement to our team that she was resigning, I wracked my brain trying to think of a good replacement and Emily was the only good replacement I could think of. I’m over the moon that after a few weeks of prayer and thinking about it, she said yes!

Emily still needs to graduate (next spring) and raise her support though, so in the meantime, I will be personally taking on a greater share of the content creation, and we’ve already planned out most of the videos, podcasts, and articles we’ll be publishing during the next few months. We are definitely understaffed, having gone from four content creators to two in about a year, so our publishing schedule may have to slow down a bit, since I can’t neglect my other responsibilities in leading ERI to go into full-time content creation. We want to serve you as best we can, though, which is why it would really help me if you took this survey, which will help us make decisions on what kinds of content to create more and less of, based on what is most important to followers like YOU.

Generally speaking, we are planning on focusing less of our time in the next few years on creating advanced philosophical content for the top 1% of pro-life apologists. Much of the pro-life movement still doesn’t know the basic version of the Equal Rights Argument (explained in the video below), which we’ve found to change more pro-choice minds than any other argument! So we want to focus on getting our content in front of more people than ever before so that we can have a greater net effect on the pro-life movement. Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean that we’re losing what makes us special. We will still bring our trademark clear thinking to bear on current events, pro-life and pro-choice arguments, and practical dialogue tips.

Thank you so much for all of your support, which makes our work possible. While I am naturally a little overwhelmed at the work ahead of us in the short-term, I have never been more optimistic about the impact we can make in the long-term. If you would like to help, there are two things you can do that would help me the most:

1. Share our content on social media. We don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on Facebook ads, so if you, like many of our followers, think that we produce some of the best training content in the pro-life movement, we need your help to get that content in front of more pro-life people who could use the help!
2. Support us financially. We’ve had a tough year due to COVID-19, and if you have the means to support our work financially, you could lighten the burden. For example, if we had a little more financial buffer, I could pay a contractor to take a lot of the video editing off of my plate. I already know the perfect local person for this. With some more buffer, I could hire a fundraiser to take much of that work off of my plate, giving me even more time to do what most of you want me focused on: creating great articles, podcasts, and videos. You can support us securely at this donation page, and if you’re already a donor and would like to increase your recurring gift, please email me, and I’d be happy to take care of that!

Josh Brahm
President and Co-Founder