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.
Pro-choice people often bring underlying assumptions to the table when discussing abortion. Most of the time, while these assumptions play an important part in how they justify their position, they won’t say them out loud and may not even be able to articulate them. If we don’t reveal and confront these hidden premises in our conversations about abortion, we have a much smaller chance of getting a pro-choice person to think differently about abortion.
Social media brings out the worst in people. Many people take the opportunity to spew their thoughts onto the screen with relative anonymity and little self-reflection. This has wreaked havoc on civil communication for the past decade, leaving hateful comment threads and a tendency to always assume the worst of intentions in its wake. We have many colorful words for obnoxious people who harass others on the Internet, from “trolls” to “gaslighters.” A few weeks ago, I was introduced to a new term: the “sea lion.”
If you’ve read our blog before, you’re hopefully familiar with the Equal Rights Argument. We’ve seen it change more minds than any other pro-life argument we’ve used. It’s so effective, we named our organization after it!
Just because the Equal Rights Argument is convincing doesn’t mean it has no pitfalls or potential places to go wrong. When preparing to update the argument for the Equipped for Life Course, I ran a small focus group where I used our new method of teaching the argument to students who weren’t already familiar with the Equal Rights Argument, and then watched them try it in improvised roleplay dialogues. While they did really well, adding evidence that this new teaching method was an improvement, I noticed them make three mistakes while making the Equal Rights Argument. In fact, I had already seen people make these mistakes in real or practice dialogues in the past. As I drove away from that focus group I realized that all three of these mistakes are natural for pro-life people to make, so it’s worth discussing so we don’t stumble onto these avoidable landmines.
Each of these mistakes is small, but they can derail your conversation about abortion. If you learn to avoid them in advance, it will be more likely that the pro-choice person will see that to be pro-equality they need to be pro-life.
“Connecting the pro-life movement and special needs community one story at a time.”
That’s the mantra at my pro-life and special-needs-awareness blog Especially Pro-Life. To live up to that, I wanted to talk about the area where the pro-life and disability rights movements most closely meet: prenatal diagnosis.
There are times in my life that I look back and think, “Wow, I really wish I knew then what I know now.”
One such time was a few years ago when I had a conversation with my pro-choice friend. Back then, I was not involved with the pro-life movement and I was only pro-life mostly by default as a Christian. I had not given my pro-life position much thought and I certainly had not thought about how to dialogue about abortion.
My friend and I were in the same department at graduate school. We had met on one of the first days of new student orientation and quickly became best friends. She was from India and was the opposite of me in many ways, but we made our friendship work. If I knew then what I know now about Indian culture, her personal background, and pro-life apologetics, our conversation would have gone much differently.