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.

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

“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. 

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

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.

If I hear the words “Zoom meeting” one more time, I think I might scream. Let me tell you, doing college over Zoom is NOT FUN. Nope. Not at all. Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m grateful to be able to go to school without endangering my classmates and professors, but nothing about college is the same when everything you love doing gets shoved online. From classes to clubs to music to sports to a social life, college students all over the country have been finding creative ways to bring some sense of normalcy to the “Zoom University” experience.

But for collegiate pro-life advocates like me, there is one really big thing that we can’t do on Zoom, no matter how creative we get: outreach. Thousands of colleges have moved their education entirely online this semester, while the many who have retained some in-person experience have prohibited gatherings of student organizations and displays that could cause any form of congregating. My club and hundreds of other Students for Life groups around the nation are trying to engage a student body we can’t physically talk to! And it’s already difficult to recruit and maintain members, let alone when the number of productive things we can actually do on campus is almost zero…or so you might think.

A few weeks ago, I had an amazing Zoom call brainstorm session with Garrett, the Vice President of Case for Life at Case Western Reserve University. Garrett and his club have been dealing with an even more challenging situation than the one I find myself in at St. Olaf College; most of them aren’t permitted to come to campus, tasking Garrett and his fellow officers with trying to run an effective pro-life club from their laptops sitting in all corners of the United States. Spoiler alert: they’re doing a pretty fabulous job. But when Garrett reached out to me for more ideas, we combined my own experiences in the past 9 months with Students for Life at St. Olaf plus his stories from Case for Life to come up with some tips for what to do when your pro-life group can’t do outreach during COVID-19.

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes