You can expect an audio blog every Thursday, monthly ERI updates, and occasional live speech/Q&A audios. Pretty soon we’ll also start featuring regular 3-5 minute snippets from the Equipped for Life Course Podcast as well.
Josh Brahm interviews Ali Rak, an incredibly effective community organizer and activist in Maryland, to explain the nuts and bolts of how she gets people involved in contacting their political representatives in order to accomplish pro-life goals.
Josh interviews Family Therapist Julie Dodson to discuss the “Showing Understanding Skill” technique she’s been trained in. Pro-life advocates can use this skill to grow in their empathy and navigate conversations better, especially the ones that turn to particularly emotional aspects of the abortion debate.
The four steps are:
1: Listen in a way that shows strong interest.
2: Become the other person.
3: Name thoughts, feelings, concerns/meanings, and desires.
4: Accept and make corrections graciously.
Josh interviews Gary Freeman from Care Net. They talk about how Gary went from being a preacher’s kid to serving fathers in pregnancy centers, including the struggles of trying to figure out the best way to do that!
Content warning: This conversation necessarily includes some thought experiments that relate to sexual abuse, as well as the real-world example of Jeffrey Epstein. As usual, the discussion isn’t graphic, but we want our listeners who are survivors of sexual assault to know that and make an informed decision of whether they want to listen to this episode or not.
It’s Rachel’s last episode! She and Josh discuss how pro-choice people are often inclined to believe that adult women should be prioritized over fetal humans because adults have thoughts, dreams, and relationships. They offer some talking points for pro-lifers including some thought experiments that might help the conversation become more productive. Josh also tells a story about a related dialogue he had with a philosophy professor about prison reform, and how pro-life advocates tend to be primarily motivated by different things, especially when they first become passionate about this issue.
Josh and Rachel discuss the common pro-choice phrase, “consent to sex is not consent to pregnancy” in greater detail than we covered in our recent video on the “Abortion as Self-Defense” argument. There is a version of this argument that is so strong, Rachel says she would use it if she were pro-choice! There are both strong pro-life responses to that argument, and there are also some really cringey ones, and we want to help you avoid the bad ones so you can change more minds!