Author Archives

Timothy Brahm

Former Director of Training

Timothy Brahm was formerly the Director of Training at Equal Rights Institute. He is interested in helping pro-life and pro-choice people to have better dialogues about abortion through 1) taking care to understand what the other person means, 2) using more carefully-constructed arguments, and 3) treating each other with care and respect. He graduated from Biola University with a B.A. in philosophy and is a perpetual member of the Torrey Honors Institute.

Posted on

Avoiding an Embarrassingly Common Pro-Life Mistake

by

Don’t you hate it when your honest clarification question is mistaken for the start of a fallacious argument?

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes.

lincoln_title2

Almost every time in the last year I’ve talked with pro-choice students at a pro-life outreach, I’ve had an exchange that goes something like this:

Pro-Choice Student: The fetus isn’t even a person.

Tim: We agreed earlier that a newborn is a person. Do you think a fetus is a person right before birth?

Pro-Choice Student: *sigh* I know where you’re going with this, you’re going to try to trap me by asking if it’s a person right before that, or right before that.

Tim: No! I’m so glad you said that because that gives me the opportunity to clarify. The argument you’re describing is a logical fallacy, it’s one of the worst pro-life arguments I’ve ever heard, and if any pro-lifer out here makes that argument, I’ll prove them wrong on your behalf. I’m not trying to trap you, I’m just trying to figure out what your position is. What is it that makes us persons?

Unfortunately, because of how common this pro-life mistake is, the pro-choice student is expecting our conversation to go something like this:

Pro-Choice: The fetus isn’t a person.

Pro-Life: When do you think it becomes a person?

C: It isn’t a person until it can think.

L: So would you say it’s a person at birth?

C: Sure, it can think at birth.

L: Well, how about the day before it’s born?

C: I don’t know, maybe.

L: How about the day before that?

C: I think I see where this is going…

L: And how about the day before that? You just have to push back a little at a time to prove that there isn’t a difference between a newborn and a fetus. If the newborn is human, and there isn’t any big change in any day of its development, then it must have been human at the beginning.

C: Well I think there’s a big difference between the day it can think and the day before that.

L: Okay, then let’s talk about the day it can think. How about one second before that? The difference in the fetus from second to second is miniscule. So how can you say it is not human one second and human the next?

C: I don’t know how to explain it but I’m not persuaded.

Posted on

Autumn in the Sovereign Zone: Why “It’s My Body, I Can Do What I Want” Won’t Do

by

SovZone

Estimated reading time:18 minutes.

This post was first published at EvangelicalOutpost.com. I wrote it while on staff with Justice For All, and it wouldn’t have been possible without JFA’s excellent staff and generous supporters.

Autumn in the Sovereign Zone[1]

Anyone who has ever heard a conversation about abortion has heard pro-choice statements like:

  • “My body, my choice.”
  • “You can’t tell another person what she can’t do with her own body.”
  • “The fetus is part of her body.”
  • “The fetus is inside her body.”

When a pro-life advocate hears statements like these, a common impulse is to respond by saying, “But it’s not her body; it’s another body!” or “If the fetus is part of her body, does she have two heads and twenty toes?” or, perhaps, “But the unborn is a human being, here’s some evidence for that…”

Not so fast.  The pro-choice statements above are ambiguous.  If the pro-choice advocate is confused about whether the unborn is a separate organism from the mother, then graciously giving him an impromptu biology lesson might be helpful.  In many cases, though, the pro-choice advocate is intending to communicate that the woman can do what she wants even if the fetus is a human being.  Many pro-choice advocates don’t know how to articulate this argument in a way that helps pro-life advocates understand.  The pro-life advocate hears, “The fetus is not human,” but the pro-choice advocate means, “It doesn’t matter if the fetus is human.”

Posted on

Two Simple Tips to Help You Master the Art of Clarity

by

Background

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes.

Have you ever had a really ugly fight with someone close to you, only to realize after the fact that it was all based on a simple misunderstanding? It’s very frustrating, especially because all of the pain of that fight could have been avoided if just one of the two parties had been better at clarity.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a personal issue with a loved one, a writing assignment for a class, or a dialogue about something controversial like abortion, the ability to communicate clearly is paramount to success. While no one can become good at clarity overnight, I have two very simple, very effective tactics to offer. These are not ground-breaking, in fact I regularly notice good communicators that follow these guidelines. I just haven’t noticed anyone point these practices out as generally helpful.

While it would be nice if both parties worked equally hard at being clear and with equal skill, no one should expect that. So my attitude in any conversation is that clarity is completely my responsibility. That doesn’t mean it’s actually my fault any time there is a misunderstanding. But I should work hard to make sure I understand the ideas she is trying to express, just like I’m going to work hard to help her understand my ideas.

#1: Make sure you understand her by repeating what she said back to her in different words.

The more conversations I have about abortion, the more aware I am of the vast cultural gap between pro-life and pro-choice people. You would think two people that speak English fluently would be speaking the same language, but that really isn’t the case sometimes. Words and phrases have different connotations to different people depending on the family they grew up in, the culture they identify with, the experiences they have had in the past with those words and phrases, and who knows how many other factors. So any time I think there’s a good chance she could mean different things by something she said, I’ll say something like:

“I want to make sure I’m understanding you. Let me repeat back to you what I heard you say, so then you can correct me if I’ve gotten it wrong. It sounded to me like you said…”

Posted on

Relating to Relativists

by

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes.

Since I started working as a pro-life advocate in 2011, I have deeply struggled with how to have productive conversations with moral relativists.  I could “win a debate” with them, but I have a loftier goal of actually changing their minds, and I was nowhere near meeting that goal.

For a while my strategy was to ask moral relativists really uncomfortable questions, such as “Is slavery immoral?” But this strategy almost never worked.  If they believed morality is subjective to the individual, they would say, “No, I just don’t like it.” If they believed morality is subjective to the culture, they would say, “It’s wrong now, but only because our culture came to decide that.”  Strangely, no one ever seemed to be uncomfortable after giving those responses.

Next I tried pointing out the logical inconsistency of them on one hand claiming there is no objective morality, and on the other hand implying I had moral failings for disagreeing with them about something like abortion.  That also did not seem to help, either because they could not understand the logic or because they chose to ignore it.  One time I even pretended to steal a guy’s bicycle, but he found that to be more cute than persuasive.

Last fall I tried something different when I met an alternative version of me.

Posted on

Are We Afraid of the Truth?

by

 

Timothy Brahm dialogues with students at CSU Bakersfield.

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes.

Lately at Equal Rights Institute we have been emphasizing the importance of showing compassion to people, listening to them, and loving them. Several of our followers have responded to this emphasis by asking, “Are you guys wimpy about the truth? Do you just go around giving hugs, making friends, and avoiding the hard stuff?” I think that’s a question worth answering.

Here’s the problem: navigating conversations about abortion is tough, because balancing truth and love is tough. [Tweet that!]

Pro-choice people need to be told, challenged by, and sometimes even confronted with the truth. But we are not telling them the truth just to make ourselves feel like we’ve done our pro-life duty. We want to share the truth with them in the way that is most likely to get through to them, and sometimes that means being patient. Sometimes I spend a great deal of time just listening to someone, partially because I think that will help them to be more receptive to truth later.

I could just lead every conversation by saying, “Abortion is sin, it kills a helpless baby, you’re a sinner, you need Jesus, and you’re going to hell if you don’t have Jesus.” I think those are all true statements, all of which I’d like to get to during the conversation. The reason I don’t lead with that is not that I’m afraid of the truth or that I lack conviction, but because it’s foolish and short-sighted to just blast people with the truth, with no thought to how they are going to respond to it. [Tweet that]

To quote my brother Josh Brahm from his speech at the Students for Life conference this year:

“Can we stop treating people like formulas for a second and remember that they’re people, and that people have different needs? . . . Every conversation is a series of difficult judgment calls amidst prayer without ceasing. And I don’t think I always make the right calls. But I certainly don’t think I should run every conversation from the same script.” [Tweet that]