Category Archives: Practical Dialogue Tips

After going through the fire of 3,000+ conversations with pro-choice people, we’ve learned a lot of things that create an environment in the conversation where the other person is more likely to change their mind. These are some of those nitty-gritty dialogue tips.

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Do Pro-Choice People Make Me Angry?

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Estimated reading time: 4 minutes.

I have a great pro-choice friend who is both a careful thinker and very open-minded. I think we’ve exchanged about 100 emails to each other so far, and we’re far from finished. With her permission, I want to share with you a few questions she asked me this morning about getting angry, as well as my response to her. It gave me the chance to clear up a few common concerns and misconceptions that pro-life people have about my work.

She wrote:

I feel like kind of a jerk.  I was defending one of our mutual pro-life friends to some of his pro-choice friends and they were being really difficult. I ended the conversation by basically calling them idiots and saying that talking to them was a waste of time. I feel kind of terrible about it.  Have you had any similar experiences?  How do you avoid getting angry?

This was my reply:

I definitely think there are times where it’s time to graciously end the conversation. I spent about eight minutes talking about that here.

I haven’t seen the thread, but I’m proud of you standing up to pro-choice people defending a pro-lifer. I’ve definitely done the same, defending pro-choice people around jerky pro-lifers. For example, if I’m on campus mentoring new pro-life volunteers, and the volunteer is not listening to the pro-choice person or straw-manning their argument, I will step in and explain what I see happening, and give the pro-choice person a chance to re-articulate what they’re saying. There’s even been a few times where I’ve pointed out the problems with the pro-life persons argument. I’m going to publish a blog post that includes one of those stories soon. That’s pretty rare if I’m mentoring a volunteer on a college campus, even though I see volunteers making poor arguments often. It would just be overwhelming for them if I jumped on them at every opportunity. They’re new and they’re hanging out on a campus doing what practically NOBODY that calls themselves “pro-life” are doing: physically talking to pro-choice people.

angry manMy pastor asked me recently about whether I get angry when people make logical pro-choice arguments, even arguments like Michael Tooley’s that permit infanticide. I responded that those arguments don’t make me angry, because the pro-choice person is trying to make a careful and consistent argument. I get more annoyed when I give a bunch of great arguments, the pro-choice person has no counter-arguments, and then says something like, “that was all very interesting. Well, I’m still pro-choice. Good bye.” That’s just intellectually lazy, and it does annoy me. But what REALLY ticks me off is when I see Christians being jerks. There hasn’t been a day in the last year or two of abortion-related work that has made me more frustrated and wanting to cry and yell then the events of this day.

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Pro-Choice Person Converts After Thinking About the Gosnell Case

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This is exactly what I’ve been hoping would happen: pro-choice people that think about abortion in a new way because of the Gosnell case, but not stopping there, but then asking a key question: “Is there a morally relevant difference between what Gosnell did and other abortions that are less obviously barbaric?”

A Redditor just posted this brief note on the pro-life subreddit:

The entire Kermit Gosnell case changed me from staunchly pro-choice to pro-life. I am a single 30-year old male…not at all someone who stands to gain from a pro-life view. When I heard the details of this, my stomach turned. I tried to reason with myself as to why this affected me but “standard” abortions did not. Granted, this was beyond the pale, but the message remained clear: this man took human lives.

I don’t want to get downvoted for this change in mindset, but if it happens, it happens. I have to listen to my heart’s message in the matter and while I feel for the women who felt they had no other option, this was not it. I’m uncomfortable with how strongly I feel about the subject, but I can’t make it okay with myself. (emphasis added)

This is why I just published a discussion of how pro-lifers can have productive conversations about Gosnell. It’s all about starting with the common ground of Gosnell, and then leading the conversation purposefully to first trimester abortions. It’s more work, but the chance of changing the person’s mind about abortion altogether are much higher.

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What We Can Learn from Hateful Street Preachers

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Estimated reading time: 10 minutes.

Update: 3/25/13: This article has gone viral. Thanks to Abby Johnson, Live Action News and LifeSiteNews for running it. The article has been shared all over Facebook with thousands of views, likes and comments. I hear it’s been discussed all over Fresno State University, even among non-Christians. Thanks so much to everybody that shared it.

Update: 7/2/13: I just published a follow-up post with three excellent points on the topic of angry street preaching from Stand to Reason.

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Today was a weird day. While at Fresno State University, I witnessed the worst street preaching I’ve ever seen. I also witnessed what God can do with a few humble servants that want to show love while preaching truth to a crowd of disgusted atheists, Mormons, Muslims, and at least one Catholic guy. While telling the story, I’m going to write some things that have been going on in my heart lately as I think about communicating effectively to people who are different from us.

I was at Fresno State with my colleagues Gabi Vehrs, Kyle Goddard and Clinton Wilcox with hopes of engaging the students on the issue of abortion. We haven’t had a lot of success with Fresno State’s busy students in the past, so we set up a small JFA exhibit that we hadn’t used before at FSU as an R&D test, and just invited a few seasoned pro-life advocates to join us and test the outreach tool and its effect on FSU students.

A few decent dialogues later we heard some loud noises coming from the Free Speech Area. We looked over, and I saw three street preachers yelling at the students, some of whom stopped to listen.

Before I describe what they were saying, I should say something. I don’t think all street preaching is bad. I think people like Ray Comfort can be very effective, but he’s a seasoned evangelist who has gained some very helpful skills and a lot of experience. I generally prefer relational evangelism, because most people are going to take the words of a friend much more seriously than the words of a stranger. That being said, a thoughtful street evangelist can get some people thinking about religious ideas, and obviously that’s a good thing.

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Does NASA’s Definition of Life Conflict with the Pro-Life Position?

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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes.

I had a conversation with a pro-choice person this year that was unique enough that it bears repeating, in case you ever hear a similar argument.

We set up some poll tables and Justice For All‘s new “Where Do You Draw the Line” exhibit at Fresno City College.

Photo courtesy of Justice For All.

Photo courtesy of Justice For All.

A student walked up, and I engaged him, asking him what he thought about abortion. “Mark” responded by saying something I almost never hear on college campuses: “I don’t agree that the unborn is alive.”

I responded the way JFA’s Steve Wagner trains people to respond when someone says something like “no one knows when life begins!” I asked a clarification question: “Do you mean biological life, or something more philosophical, like when a person with rights and value begins?”

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Postscript to My “After-Birth Abortion” Article

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Last March I wrote a piece about the now infamous “after-birth abortion” article by philosophers Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva. Instead of merely emoting about the evil of infanticide, I sought to understand the philosophers’ argument, and refute it with illustrations that expose its counter-intuitive implications. I primarily argued against Giubilini and Minerva’s bizarre view of what “harm” is, demonstrating that their definition of harm cripples their other arguments.

After more thinking on the subject, I now realize that a few of my illustrations toward the end of the article didn’t respond to their precise view of harm. This postscript is an attempt to explain why.

To recap, here’s what the authors believe about harm: an act can harm you now if you are currently able to value the different situation you would have enjoyed, but even if the act can’t harm “you” now, it can still harm “you” at the point in the future when you are able to value the different situation. Because the newborn killed in an “after-birth abortion” never lives long enough to value the condition of living, she is not harmed.

To refute this view of harm, I offered an illustration, which I still believe demonstrates how counter-intuitive their view is:

A pregnant mother suffering from severe nausea asks her OB/GYN for Thalidomide, an anti-nausea drug that was used by pregnant women in the late ’50s before the medical community realized that it causes severe fetal deformities. Pregnant women have not been allowed to take that drug since, but imagine that the pregnant mother in my story finds a way to get Thalidomide illegally, and takes it, causing her baby to be born without arms and legs. Giubilini and Minerva would have to say that the fetus was not harmed at the time the mother took Thalidomide. He was harmed on the day that he first experienced a desire for arms and legs. So the harm-inducing drug didn’t harm him for the years he did not experience a desire for arms and legs. At the time when it caused his arms and legs to grow improperly, was it helping him? Did it have a neutral effect on his body? Isn’t it obvious that while the fetus might be harmed in an additional way later on (psychological pain due to the arms and legs he is consciously missing), he is right now, at the time the thalidomide is altering his cellular development, being harmed in a basic sense.