We recently had Monica Snyder from Secular Pro-Life on our podcast to discuss these cases. I highly recommend listening to that episode if you haven’t already, as I consider this article to be a companion/response to the podcast. Really, I’m just running a highlighter over a theme that’s been on my mind for many months now: many of these tragedies aren’t the result of abortion restrictions; they’re the result of a broken system that pro-choice liberals already agree is broken.

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

While there are definitely exceptions, most pro-choice people identify as liberal or leftist. More specifically, they might consider feminism, anti-racism, and support for socialized medicine as core values or philosophies. As a result, these folks are likely to hold at least some of the following beliefs:

• The American medical industry prioritizes profit over patient care
• The American medical industry, especially insurance companies, regularly kill people by denying them vital care or delaying care via bureaucracy 
• Medical providers are wildly under-resourced, understaffed, and overworked
• Women and racial minorities’ concerns and symptoms are disproportionally dismissed or downplayed by medical professionals
• The medical industry does not put adequate resources into researching and caring for maladies in female and non-white bodies, instead focusing on white males as the norm
• The lack of adequate social safety nets means that low-income workers often must choose between caring for their health and paying their bills

We don’t have to unpack whether these beliefs are right or wrong, or whether they’re exclusive to those on the political left (I imagine that for at least some of these, right-leaning folks agree on the problems, just not the proposed left-wing solutions). The point is that in non-abortion contexts, the majority of pro-choice people already believe that our systems, including healthcare, are broken in ways that kill people–especially women, and especially poor, non-white women. They’re already primed to understand that these problems go deeper than abortion restrictions.

On the pro-life side, regardless of deeper beliefs, we generally recognize that these tragic stories are the horrific symptoms of some other problem. To give a quick overview of just a few cases:

Nevaeh Crain – Nevaeh went to two different E.R.s experiencing serious symptoms. The first E.R. dismissed her out of hand without investigating her symptoms at all. The second E.R. sent her home, knowing that she was actively septic and not responding to their initial treatments. Nevaeh died because these hospitals did not take her symptoms seriously and did not meet even a basic standard of care.

Josselli Barnica – Josselli faced an inevitable miscarriage at 17 weeks, and her care team waited an absurdly long time to intervene with a D&C. Her care team cited Texas’s heartbeat law for this decision, and abortion advocates blame the law (which was grossly misinterpreted) for the delay that caused Josselli’s death. While these elements seem to be factors, a closer look reveals straightforward, gross malpractice on the part of the care team. After finally doing the D&C, her doctors didn’t even confirm a complete miscarriage, didn’t properly monitor her, and they sent her home with pieces of her dead baby still inside of her. Even worse, when she called to complain of symptoms, they dismissed her concerns instead of taking her seriously.

Yeni Alvarez – Yeni started experiencing complications with her pregnancy at only 7 weeks, and died from those complications at 31 weeks. Yeni’s doctors believed she needed to be hospitalized for hypertension, but Yeni could not afford the hospital stay or the time off of work she would have had to take to get treatment. Additionally, the rural hospital did not have the resources to provide the best care for a complex, risky pregnancy. Yeni explicitly did not want an abortion, and a lack of abortion access wasn’t what killed her—it was a lack of critical economic and healthcare support.

Pro-life advocates see these patterns of malpractice and lack of adequate support—even if we may not agree with pro-choice advocates about exactly how to fix them—because we’re already primed to find something other than the abortion restrictions to blame for these tragic deaths. Conversely, pro-choice advocates sometimes seem to forget the beliefs they already have about our broken healthcare system in order to center abortion rights. That’s a bit of an oversimplification—the average pro-choice person has a lot of understandable reasons for interpreting these stories the way that they do. But even though it’s not the only factor driving pro-choice people’s responses, I think it’s a big enough factor that it can help us answer an important question: what can we do to bridge this gap?

A lot of the work we do at Equal Rights Institute is about finding common ground, and helping pro-choice people see that the pro-life worldview actually isn’t all that incompatible with the beliefs they already hold. In this case, even if we can’t fully convince our pro-choice neighbors on full prenatal rights, I believe this is still critical common ground that we desperately need to dig into. We have the opportunity to connect with their existing beliefs about deficiencies in our systems and work together to solve those deficiencies. 

The Practical

I want to be clear that the pragmatic reasons for emphasizing this common ground don’t hold a candle to the principled, moral reasons (more on that later). But it’s still worth thinking a bit about the practical benefits of helping pro-choice people see this particular piece of common ground. 

For one, it can help you build rapport in a dialogue. If your pro-choice friend brings up one of these cases, you have the chance to speak their language and highlight something they value. Genuine expressions of anger and frustration over how these women were failed can go a long way.

I’m left-leaning myself, so it’s a bit easier for me to emphasize my beliefs about how our systems failed these women. I’m also someone who’s chronically ill and has experience with doctors basically diagnosing me with “having a uterus” and refusing to seriously examine my symptoms. Both of these things position me to make strong points that resonate with my liberal, pro-choice dialogue partners, and if either is true for you, I encourage you to lean into that.

For our more conservative friends, I suspect you have a lot of common ground here too. After all, even if liberals and conservatives tend to disagree on the solutions or root causes of problems, we still usually can agree that there is a problem. You don’t have to agree that every one of these tragic deaths was caused by medical racism, or that socialized medicine would solve everything. All you have to do is affirm that our current systems aren’t perfect, that this sometimes has tragic results, and you want to do what you can to address these problems at their source. And if you or someone you love has had any negative experiences with our healthcare system, and you’re comfortable sharing parts of that story, being vulnerable about how our imperfect systems have affected you can go a long way to a pro-choice person bringing their walls down and realizing that we’re on the same team.

There’s a second practical benefit to leaning into this common ground: if we can work together to address the root causes of maternal mortality and significantly reduce the amount of unnecessary deaths, we remove one of the most powerful weapons the abortion lobby is wielding against us. 

These terrible outcomes and the way they’re being reported in the media is one of the biggest barriers to winning support for our cause. Fear is an incredibly powerful political tool. Even people who consider themselves pro-life are being persuaded away from legislating against elective abortion because they’re (rightfully) concerned about how these laws could impact lifesaving, completely morally justified care.

The Principled

Of course, the most important reasons that it’s so critical for us to highlight this common ground are principled, moral reasons. 

None of these women had to die. In some cases, their babies didn’t have to die either.

There are real people, real families, who have been devastated by the loss of their loved ones. Not to mention the terrible pain and fear these women must have experienced as they were dying. They deserved proper medical care, and they deserve to be respected as more than political chess pieces. We need to honor them by doing everything we can to prevent this from happening to somebody else.

We’re pro-life because we believe humans matter. Many of us have religious beliefs that assign near-infinite worth to the human person. This shouldn’t just be about politics for us. We care about the lives of pregnant people just as much as we care about the children they carry.

This being the case, we must find ways to reach across the aisle and work with our pro-choice opponents on reducing maternal mortality. We need to be careful not to dismiss real medical malpractice and preventable deaths as mere pro-choice talking points, just like pro-choice people need to not pass off broader issues of medical malpractice as a pro-life laws problem.

The Practical, Again

I’m not going to prescribe any specific policy solution; that’s above my paygrade. What I will say is that this situation is literally life and death for thousands of real humans, both in terms of their immediate medical care, and in terms of the long-term viability of pro-life legislation. When the stakes are this high, we all—pro-life and pro-choice—have an obligation to put down our polarized, partisan tendencies and address the situation in a sober, serious way.

Most people reading this aren’t leaders with policy influence, and figuring out our part in this can be daunting. I want to leave you with some practical things you can do:

• Investigate efforts to decrease maternal mortality in your state, and find at least one policy or effort you can publicly support
• Are you an older mom with a strong spine and experience navigating doctors’ appointments? If you’re already close with a younger woman who’s pregnant for the first time, you can offer to attend appointments with her as a peer advocate, especially if she’s having difficulty getting doctors to hear her concerns. Or if she’d rather attend alone, help her write a birth plan, research and prepare specific questions for her next appointment, or practice with her exactly what she’s going to say. (Sidenote: my colleague Emily says this content creator helped her a lot during her own pregnancy. She has tons of helpful videos on how to ask good questions of your OB/GYN and decline procedures you don’t want during pregnancy!) 
• And, of course, have dialogues with your pro-choice friends that highlight our shared concerns for these moms. Even if we can’t fully bring them to our side on abortion, we can still build powerful coalitions with each other to protect women and children.

Let’s find common ground with our pro-choice friends and save some lives together. It requires gently breaking down some emotional walls on both sides, but it’s worth it.

The post Critical Common Ground in Medical Tragedies originally appeared at the Equal Rights Institute blog. Subscribe to our email list with the form below and get a FREE gift. Click here to learn more about our pro-life apologetics course, “Equipped for Life: A Fresh Approach to Conversations About Abortion.” 

The preceding post is the property of Ellen Campbell (apart from quotations, which are the property of their respective owners, and works of art as credited; images are often freely available to the public,) and should not be reproduced in part or in whole without the expressed consent of the author. All content on this site is the property of Equal Rights Institute unless the post was written by a co-blogger or guest, and the content is made available for individual and personal usage. If you cite from these documents, whether for personal or professional purposes, please give appropriate citation with both the name of the author Ellen Campbell) and a link to the original URL. If you’d like to repost a post, you may do so, provided you show only the first three paragraphs on your own site and link to the original post for the rest. You must also appropriately cite the post as noted above. This blog is protected by Creative Commons licensing. By viewing any part of this site, you are agreeing to this usage policy.

The post Critical Common Ground in Medical Tragedies appeared first on Equal Rights Institute Blog - Clear Pro-Life Thinking.

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

As someone who went into college already passionate about pro-life apologetics and advocacy, these setbacks were a little agonizing. Josh and ERI’s approach to the abortion issue was literally life-changing for me in high school. Without it, my pro-life beliefs likely never would’ve progressed past a personal religious conviction, and I never would’ve understood how possible it was to persuade my pro-choice peers to change their perspective on one of the greatest human rights abuses of our time. I’d been given a message that I desperately wanted to share, and I felt like I knew the best arguments to share—but it felt like I couldn’t.

Non-Apologetic Pro-Life Work Is Real and Valuable

There is one obvious answer to my predicament that I’d be silly to skip over—there are plenty of ways to be actively and effectively pro-life that require next to no talking, with strangers or anyone else! An excellent place to get started is HowToBeProLife.com from our friends at Secular Pro-Life, which offers several ideas.

The first pro-life work I ever did was sweeping the floors and scrubbing the baseboards of my local pregnancy resource center. It seems insignificant, but it really does make a difference to a likely overworked and emotionally exhausted team of client advocates when you can take menial tasks off their plate. It also makes a big impact psychologically on clients when they get to walk into a freshly cleaned lobby. 

Volunteer work like this will probably still require some initial discussion with PRC directors to get started, which can be intimidating if you’re very socially anxious. This is where your local “emotional support friend” can be a great help (and for the social butterflies reading this, offering to be this person for your shy friends means more than you could know). Even if your friend can’t be a regular volunteer, they can help make introductions and provide a boost over that initial hurdle.

What If Your Passion Is Still Apologetics?

As critical and effective as non-apologetic pro-life work is, it never fulfilled my passion to spread important messages. If you’re a follower of ERI, you have a higher than average chance of sharing this passion. If you do share it, then for you it’s not just about whether or not you can be at all useful towards pro-life causes (you can!); it’s about whether or not there’s any outlet for you to effectively share powerful truths, like the moral significance of prenatal humans or the real heart behind pro-choice people’s convictions. If that’s what’s burning inside you, no amount of practical, non-apologetic work is going to quell that, even if it’s genuinely valuable.

A lot of our more recent materials emphasize the table outreach format because it’s a really effective tool for the many, many college students we train, and most of our staff came from active college groups. It’s the context they’re most familiar with and have the most stories about! This can give a false impression that public outreach is the only way to be an effective apologist.

The reality is that there’s an entire other pillar of pro-life advocacy that ERI’s materials are built on: relational apologetics, or apologetics in the context of existing friendships. This is the niche I’ve found joy and success in, and I’d like to spend the rest of this article sketching out a couple of different expressions of this.

Informing Pro-Life Friends

While the most obvious application of pro-life apologetics training is convincing our pro-choice peers, these skills don’t have to be reserved for talking to people we disagree with. We can also be a resource for people who already share our position. 

This is often one of the easiest places to start for socially anxious pro-lifers who are held up by a fear of rejection. There are a lot of factors that could be contributing to a person’s social anxiety, but for me personally, one of the biggest factors is something called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD). Basically, because of the way my brain is wired, my brain and body process rejection way more intensely than most people. As you can imagine, this makes discussing abortion with pro-choice people a lot more emotionally and physically draining, even if it’s still worthwhile.

This being the case, I more naturally fell into a sort of consultant role with my pro-life friends, even before I started working at ERI. These friends were pro-life, but they weren’t activists. They had other important callings, and didn’t have the capacity to deep dive into pro-life apologetics on their own. If they were struggling with a more difficult concept or had a question about an argument they’d encountered, they knew I’d spent a lot of time with the subject and was happy to discuss it with them. I could also function as a sort of reference librarian, pointing them towards resources on topics of interest.

This sort of thing also happens in more casual contexts. I’ll be at a dinner with people I go to church with or family friends, and my interest in pro-life advocacy comes up. Those who are casually pro-life often have a lot of curiosity about deeper pro-life ideas, as well as the motivations behind pro-choice people’s views. Obviously, it would be weird to turn every dinner party into a deep dive on abortion, but on the occasions where the people I’m with have questions, I always enjoy answering them.

I genuinely think that this low-stress application of deeper philosophical knowledge can be a valuable bridge between the many pro-life laypeople we encounter and more dedicated activists. But, this does come with a caution: it’s possible to be really annoying when we position ourselves as “The Expert,” especially when our input is unsolicited.

It’s one thing to be open about your passion for pro-life advocacy and apologetics and happily answer questions that come up. It’s another thing to go out of our way to tell fellow pro-lifers that they’re wrong and you know better, especially when the thing you think they’re doing wrong isn’t actually harmful. I’m sure that in my excitement to share what I’ve learned, I’ve erred on the side of being annoying and nitpicky. Always keep your context in mind and do your best to be sensitive to the cues you’re getting from the people you’re talking to.

Organic Conversations with Pro-Choice Friends

While staying within a relatively affirming, safe pro-life bubble can be an easier way to apply apologetics knowledge, it’s important to remember that pro-choice people aren’t actually dangerous and scary, no matter what struggles they bring up for our brain chemistry. Even if it’s more challenging, having social anxiety or a complicating factor like RSD doesn’t have to stop us from reaching out to people who disagree with us.

I have a lot of pro-choice friends, and you should have some too! As a socially anxious person, it might still be intimidating to jump straight into a direct dialogue about abortion, even with a friend. But in the context of a long-term friendship you don’t really have to do that (in fact, it might be a little too weird to suddenly veer into contentious territory without a proper lead-up). It’s entirely possible to convince someone of the pro-life position in a way that’s low-stress, low-confrontation, and organic.

When I met my best friend, they were basically pro-choice. It’s the default position for their culture, and they had encountered some horrifying descriptions of women dying from “back-alley” abortions at a young age. They also didn’t have much positive pro-life representation in their lives. Unfortunately, most of their Christian community was deeply unhealthy and actively hostile to women, and the pro-life groups they’d encountered in college relied on aggressive tactics and shocking graphic signs. My friend was already deeply uncomfortable with abortion, but their context meant that they didn’t have anyone who could effectively address their concerns, and they didn’t trust that the pro-life movement actually cared about both the woman and the baby.

This wasn’t something we talked about in depth in the beginning. Like most fledgling friendships, we focused more on our shared hobbies and interests until we got more comfortable with each other. During that time, though, we naturally began to get glimpses of each other’s political inclinations and deeper values. They learned that I was passionately pro-life, and I learned that they were a feminist who had spent a good chunk of their college education exploring the intersection of religion and gender. It was a little bit longer before they directly told me their position on abortion, but I had enough context clues to guess that it might at least be complicated for them.

All of this listening and learning informed my posture towards them whenever big topics came up. I cared for them deeply as a friend, and I knew what was important to them. When the subject of abortion came up organically, I was able to meet them where they were at and affirm the common ground and concerns we both shared. When I eventually made an argument for my pro-life views, I was able to use language and framing that was familiar to them and connected with their values.

This wasn’t some huge, groundbreaking moment, at least from my perspective. In fact, I didn’t learn until at least a year later that I’d been the first person to articulate the pro-life position to them in a way they could digest, and that those brief conversations had led them to become pro-life. While it’s encouraging to know about our impact, I actually think that this kind of situation can be ideal for socially anxious folks like myself. When I build up a moment or conversation in my head, it becomes a lot more intimidating. This was just an honest, vulnerable exchange between friends, not a crucial turning point that I had to execute perfectly.

There are a lot of folks like my friend out there who are uncomfortably pro-choice or on the fence. All they need is someone they trust who can deliver the message they need to hear. People like you and I have the opportunity to be that friend, even if we have big barriers to engaging strangers in the public square.

The Takeaway

There are many ways to be an effective pro-life advocate, even if that might look different for each of us depending on our personal strengths. You don’t have to give up on sharing the pro-life message just because you struggle with talking to strangers. Your time invested in pro-life apologetics and advocacy isn’t wasted if you aren’t constantly evangelizing. 

Right now, one of the most important things any pro-lifer can be is a thoughtful representative. We need the broader culture to see us as intelligent, reasonable, and kind if we want to continue pushing for a culture of life that protects prenatal humans. By equipping yourself with deeper knowledge, you’re forming yourself into the thoughtful representative we need. 

The post Pro-Life Advocacy When You’re Socially Anxious originally appeared at the Equal Rights Institute blog. Subscribe to our email list with the form below and get a FREE gift. Click here to learn more about our pro-life apologetics course, “Equipped for Life: A Fresh Approach to Conversations About Abortion.” 

The preceding post is the property of Ellen Campbell (apart from quotations, which are the property of their respective owners, and works of art as credited; images are often freely available to the public,) and should not be reproduced in part or in whole without the expressed consent of the author. All content on this site is the property of Equal Rights Institute unless the post was written by a co-blogger or guest, and the content is made available for individual and personal usage. If you cite from these documents, whether for personal or professional purposes, please give appropriate citation with both the name of the author Ellen Campbell) and a link to the original URL. If you’d like to repost a post, you may do so, provided you show only the first three paragraphs on your own site and link to the original post for the rest. You must also appropriately cite the post as noted above. This blog is protected by Creative Commons licensing. By viewing any part of this site, you are agreeing to this usage policy.

The post Pro-Life Advocacy When You’re Socially Anxious appeared first on Equal Rights Institute Blog - Clear Pro-Life Thinking.

Pregnancy centers: *exist*

Pro-choice people: “You’re manipulating women!”

On the one hand, that’s a little bit of a caricature—I’ve never seen a conversation quite that blatant. But on the other hand, I do see pro-choice people make both of those comments online a lot, and I get why that’s frustrating to pro-lifers: Pro-choice people say we don’t want to help women, we point out the many, many volunteered hours and donated dollars the pro-life movement pours into helping women, and then pro-choice people reject that obvious proof that we want to help women by saying our help is actually just a guise for manipulation. It can come across as frustrating, ad hoc, or even duplicitous.

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

But here’s the thing—if you’re pro-choice and you find yourself nodding along with both of those comments, I get it: You don’t trust our motives. That makes sense, for several reasons. 

1. We’re on opposite sides of what we can all agree is an extremely important human rights issue. It can be hard to see people who disagree about something so fundamental as reasonable or caring.
2. Unfortunately there are a lot of pro-life people who really are deeply uncaring and unempathetic. And there also really are bad, manipulative pregnancy centers. It’s fair to call them out—just like it’s fair for pro-lifers to call out bad behavior on the pro-choice side—and it can also be really difficult to resist painting everyone on the other side with the same brush, especially if you don’t have relationships with real, three-dimensional people in your life who are on the other side.
3. To be passionately pro-life and run a pregnancy center that’s genuinely giving women information non-manipulatively, even though you really, really want her not to have an abortion, might sound almost psychologically impossible.

But if you’re pro-choice, just imagine for a second what it would be like if most pregnancy centers really do what they say they do: give women who are in the middle of trauma a chance to breathe, be seen, have a safe place to think through their own desires and values, receive non-manipulative, medically accurate information about all of their options if they want it, and receive practical and relational support that makes it feel like abortion isn’t their only option. Maybe you think no pregnancy centers actually do that. But just imagine with me for a second, what if they did? Would that be something you could wholeheartedly get behind? If you’re truly pro-choice, I think it should be. Many, many women who have abortions don’t walk into the abortion clinic because they want to be there, but because they feel like they have no other choice. Both pro-life and pro-choice people should agree that if a woman really doesn’t want an abortion, abortion feels like her only choice, and there’s practical or relational support she could be given that would make it not feel like her only choice, we should really want her to have that support. So if a pregnancy center does what they say they do, pro-choice people should be just as excited about it as pro-lifers are.

And my experience is, a whole lot of pregnancy centers really do do that. I’ve talked with a pregnancy center director who intentionally refuses to keep track of the number of “babies saved,” or clients who decided not to abort, at her clinic—even though it would be an incredibly useful fundraising tool with pro-life donors—because she wants to make sure her clinic is laser-focused on caring for women, not on preventing abortions. A lower abortion rate might be a side effect that her donors are happy about, but her central goal is to provide genuine, high-quality information and care to her clients.

You and I can argue over whether pregnancy centers like hers are the exception or the rule, but in a sense it doesn’t matter, because you don’t have to take my word for it. The thing to do is to go find out—go tour your own local pregnancy center and see what you think of their approach. If you’re worried they’ll try to manipulate you or misrepresent what they do, you don’t even have to tell them you’re pro-choice. Just tell them you want to learn more about what they do and ask for a tour. I can just about guarantee you they’ll say yes. Then ask open-ended questions about what happens when a woman comes in and how they would engage with her. It’s important to check, because there really are bad pregnancy centers in the world. But there are also a whole lot of good ones.

I actually did this with my own local pregnancy center a few years ago. Some of the green flags I saw that helped me conclude it was trustworthy were:

• There weren’t any baby pictures, religious images, or religious quotes on the walls.
• There weren’t visible fetal development models or pictures. The director explained that they have 3D fetal models, but they only show them if a woman wants to see them.
• The director described her job in a conversation with a pregnant woman as being to honor the woman’s agency by giving her space that she may not have been able to get elsewhere to think through her own values.

If you do find a good pregnancy center near you, whether you’re pro-life or pro-choice, consider volunteering or donating. Because pro-life or pro-choice, we should all want women who don’t want abortions to have access to other options.

The post Dear Pro-Choice People, Give Pregnancy Centers a Chance. originally appeared at the Equal Rights Institute blog. Subscribe to our email list with the form below and get a FREE gift. Click here to learn more about our pro-life apologetics course, “Equipped for Life: A Fresh Approach to Conversations About Abortion.” 

The preceding post is the property of Rebecca Carlson (apart from quotations, which are the property of their respective owners, and works of art as credited; images are often freely available to the public,) and should not be reproduced in part or in whole without the expressed consent of the author. All content on this site is the property of Equal Rights Institute unless the post was written by a co-blogger or guest, and the content is made available for individual and personal usage. If you cite from these documents, whether for personal or professional purposes, please give appropriate citation with both the name of the author (Rebecca Carlson) and a link to the original URL. If you’d like to repost a post, you may do so, provided you show only the first three paragraphs on your own site and link to the original post for the rest. You must also appropriately cite the post as noted above. This blog is protected by Creative Commons licensing. By viewing any part of this site, you are agreeing to this usage policy.

The post Dear Pro-Choice People, Give Pregnancy Centers a Chance appeared first on Equal Rights Institute Blog - Clear Pro-Life Thinking.

It’s not hard to see why Americans overwhelmingly believe access to IVF is a good thing. I mean, Trump is right; IVF means that more couples can have more babies! What’s the problem with that?! So pro-choice people (and even some pro-life people) are incredibly confused why Trump’s Executive Order just 30 days into his presidency didn’t make us pop the champagne. 

By us, I mean Rebecca, Emily, and our awesome ERI Affiliate Groups who researched and brainstormed how to effectively respond to the bewildered looks we’ve been getting on college campuses. Rebecca and I co-wrote this article, but really the credit goes to our awesome Affiliate Group members. The pro-choice train of thought we all thought through together goes something like “Isn’t more babies exactly what pro-lifers want? But they don’t support IVF?! Oh, so it really IS just about controlling women’s bodies and sex lives after all…” Here’s what we found.

Estimated reading time: 16 minutes

The Executive Order

Rule number one. If a pro-choice person (or anyone for that matter) asks you about a thing or makes claims about a thing, go read the actual thing for yourself. 

During his campaign, Trump promised public funding or mandated insurance coverage for IVF, so I’ll be honest; when I first heard about Trump’s executive order, I (and I think a lot of other people, at least based on the pandemonium in my social media feed) automatically assumed he was making that happen. But, as I discovered upon reading it, this executive order accomplishes neither. To be clear, the IVF executive order actually accomplishes nothing. 

Here’s the important part: 

“Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy shall submit to the President a list of policy recommendations on protecting IVF access and aggressively reducing out-of-pocket and health plan costs for IVF treatment.”

We’re currently 98 days out from the Executive Order’s publishing, so it’s quite likely IVF will be back in the news in the very near future when Trump’s team reviews those policy recommendations and presumably picks one or more to try implementing.

So…What’s the Problem?

Ok, so the executive order’s first steps are moving slower than we initially thought. But still, why shouldn’t pro-lifers (and everyone!) be excited about it? Regardless of your stance on abortion, if people who want to get pregnant but are struggling with infertility have a way to be able to get pregnant, that’s great! Here’s the thing: the end doesn’t justify the means. The end, or goal, of IVF is awesome—helping people who are struggling with infertility. The means, how it gets to the goal, is the problem: long story short, it involves killing prenatal humans. 

Most people know that the goal of IVF is helping people get pregnant. A lot of people don’t know how it accomplishes that. Eggs are retrieved from the woman’s body, semen is retrieved from the man’s body, and the eggs are fertilized in a lab. Just like when the fertilization process happens in a woman’s body, as soon as fertilization is complete, you now have a human being—a living organism of the species homo sapiens. The embryo grows for 3-5 days in a lab, and is then implanted in the woman’s uterus. 

Here’s the catch: because the process is very expensive and has a relatively low success rate, doctors typically create more embryos than they plan to implant in the woman’s uterus. The remaining embryos, after growing alongside their siblings for 3-5 days, can be frozen for possible later use, donated to other couples (embryo adoption), donated to be used for research, or discarded—that is, killed. 

In theory, there is a way to do IVF that doesn’t involve the likelihood of ending up with extra embryos that are then discarded: you can create a smaller number of embryos, and transfer all the embryos who survive into the woman’s uterus, likely over the course of multiple cycles. But because a single cycle of IVF is so expensive, and because the failure rate is so high, that is prohibitively expensive and rarely practiced. In fact, in the wake of the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling that frozen embryos can be considered children, some Alabama IVF clinics stopped operations entirely, and two pro-IVF fertility doctors published an interview saying that “discarding embryos is inherent to the IVF process.”

There are several pieces of the typical IVF process that we argue are obvious human rights violations, assuming we start from the premise that the prenatal humans involved are people like you and me with an equal right to be protected from violence.

1. Since even embryos placed in the woman’s uterus are far from guaranteed to survive implantation and the rest of pregnancy, 65% of the time doctors will place multiple embryos in the woman’s uterus, in order to increase the chances that at least one embryo will successfully implant. But doctors don’t want multiple embryos to successfully implant, because multiple pregnancies (twins, triplets, etc) have higher risks for both mom and babies. So if multiple embryos do successfully implant, doctors will sometimes “selectively reduce”—that is, abort—all but one or two of the embryos.
2. Selective reduction is less common than it used to be because the technology that allows doctors to determine which embryos are likeliest to implant has improved, therefore the odds of a singleton embryo successfully implanting have increased. That’s a double-edged sword, though—it means fewer humans are being killed in utero by selective reduction, but more humans are being killed (or frozen and very likely killed later) before the implantation process even begins.

It’s worth noting that when doctors freeze or discard (kill) “extra” humans in a lab, or selectively reduce (kill) “extra” humans in a woman’s uterus, they’re not flipping a coin to pick which ones to keep. They always assess the “quality” of the embryos—the perceived likelihood that they will be able to successfully implant in the woman’s uterus—and choose embryos that are very likely to be able to implant over other embryos, including embryos that are still quite likely, but a little less likely, to be able to implant. That’s called eugenics. Worse, doctors will often (about 60% of the time) wait a few extra days to implant so that they have time to do initial genetic testing and weed out embryos who test positive for genetic diseases or chromosomal abnormalities. It’s even legal in the US to select which embryos to implant based on their sex.

Killing people—or freezing them cryogenically to maybe use them at some unspecified point in the future or maybe eventually kill them if you don’t find a use for them— at all is really bad, but choosing which people to kill based on who’s weaker or has less desired traits adds an extra layer of dystopian dehumanization. And on a practical dialogue level, the eugenics concern can be helpful to bring up with pro-choice people because it’s often common ground: even if someone is comfortable with the idea of killing very young prenatal humans, they’re typically very uncomfortable with the idea of eugenics.

Here are some additional concerns some pro-lifers may have about the IVF process:

• Natural law concerns about separating procreation from sex;
• The concern that paying for eggs to be fertilized in a lab inherently commodifies human beings;
• The idea that using IVF is “playing God” by creating humans at our will and paying for their creation as our property;
• Both moral and medical concerns about how eggs and sperm are retrieved. (Eggs are typically retrieved via ovarian hyperstimulation caused by artificial hormone medications, which can have serious side effects on a woman’s body. Sperm are retrieved via masturbation.)

Regardless of what your view is on those or other secondary concerns, it’s important to clearly differentiate them from the primary, obvious human-rights-violation concerns. Catholics in the pro-life movement often do an excellent job at this with differentiating how they see abortion from how they see contraception: They clearly communicate that while their theological teaching prohibits using condoms, for example, they don’t think using a condom is a human rights violation and don’t think it should be against the law for other people—they just want the right to act in accord with their own consciences. And they clearly communicate that they see abortion as a very different category, because it is a human rights violation, and human rights violations are the kinds of things we should have laws about.

We need the same clear distinction-making when it comes to concerns about IVF. There are some concerns that are really, really clear: every pro-lifer should be against the killing of prenatal humans, including in the IVF process. And the killing of prenatal humans, including in IVF, should be illegal. PAnd then some pro-lifers (of all theological and atheological stripes) have other secondary concerns too. Different pro-lifers disagree about which of the concerns in the secondary boat are significant, how significant they are, whether they’re legal or merely ethical matters, etc. And we should absolutely talk about those secondary concerns and our disagreements about them. But we also need to be extremely clear and emphatic that the primary, obvious, agreed-upon concern is that IVF as it is typically practiced involves killing humans.

It’s also important to remember whenever you raise any of these concerns that we’re talking about real people—the embryos who are frozen and killed, yes, but also the parents who have used IVF to conceive, and their born children. It’s still important to clearly communicate our concerns about IVF, even though the topic might be emotionally painful for people who have personal experiences with it. But it’s also important to engage compassionately and clearly communicate our common ground: that infertility can be extremely emotionally painful, that it makes sense that people could feel desperate to conceive, that parents who have used IVF that involved killing embryos are not murderers, and that children and adults who were conceived through IVF are valuable people with meaningful lives.

“So if a couple can’t get pregnant, tough for them?” 

IVF, as it is typically practiced, is a human rights violation. It should be illegal. But that’s a really hard pill to swallow for most Americans. Based on our team’s thousands of conversations with pro-choice people, we firmly believe that the majority of pro-choice people come to their position from a place of compassion and genuinely desiring to help others. They don’t want women to be stuck in poverty. They don’t want children to be born into difficult circumstances. The average pro-choice person recognizes that pregnancy and parenthood are challenging, and they want to make sure that women are going in with their eyes open, freely choosing this lot in life, and with all the resources and support they need to succeed. I’m not saying that describes every single pro-choice person out there, but it’s the vast majority. Contrary to the stereotype I hear from a lot of conservatives, it’s rare that we meet someone who genuinely believes having children is always bad or that abortion should be encouraged.  

So if most pro-choice people are coming to their position from that place of compassion—if they are truly “pro-reproductive-freedom,” as Mini Timmaraju, the President of NARAL Pro-Choice America described herself when she and I had an abortion dialogue live on MSNBC—then they should be just as sad when a woman who wants to get pregnant can’t because IVF isn’t available as when a woman who wants an abortion can’t get one because abortion isn’t available. 

Oh wait, this gets even better: I just googled NARAL Pro-Choice America and discovered that it has formally changed its name to Reproductive Freedom for All. Thank you for making my point for me. That is their new name precisely because that is the message they’re finding resonates with average Americans. 

That’s why explaining the concerns we have about IVF is a tough task. Making IVF illegal (or majorly adjusting how it’s done in a way that makes it not kill humans but also makes it more expensive and less successful) takes away the “fundamental freedom to decide if, when, and how to have a family” that Mini Timmaraju claimed we all possess. Not to mention that about 10% of US couples have experienced fertility problems. The pro-choice person you’re talking with probably knows someone who has been through infertility or miscarriage, and if it comes across like our legitimate and serious concerns with IVF mean we lack compassion for that couple, then your argument is dead on arrival. It’s not logically false, but they’re really going to struggle to hear you when you seem to have a bad case of fetus tunnel vision. 

Luckily, there are medical treatments and strategies to help couples conceive that don’t kill unborn humans. This is why IVF can actually be easier to talk about than abortion. In a lot of painful and difficult situations where abortion feels like the best way out, I don’t have an easy solution, and I have to communicate compassion without one—I have to demonstrate to the pro-choice person that I genuinely want to do anything I can to help this woman in a legitimately difficult situation, but that I don’t think it’s okay to kill people to try to solve it. 

But in the case of infertility, we actually have a potential solution, and one that’s typically cheaper, easier, and more effective than IVF. Being able to talk about this alternative to IVF is extremely helpful for your dialogues, and it’s also just a good thing for people to know about anyway! 

Dos and Don’ts of Bringing Up NaProTechnology 

NaProTechnology is incredible. It’s basically a blanket term for understanding that infertility is a symptom, and if we can find its underlying cause, then we may be able to treat it, resolve it, and cause the symptom (the infertility) to go away. For example, hormone treatments can correct a woman’s low progesterone that’s preventing her from getting or staying pregnant. Identifying and correcting vitamin deficiencies can do the same. Surgeries can unblock fallopian tubes, correct uterine abnormalities, repair pelvic adhesions, and treat endometriosis. There is a long list of medical and surgical means available to correct the conditions causing infertility, and at a vastly lower cost than IVF. A single cycle of IVF can cost between $12,000 to $25,000 and is not covered by health insurance, while NaProTechnology, because it treats underlying women’s health issues, is typically covered (and costs vastly less in the first place). 

And the success rates are impressive. Artificial fertility treatments like IVF have a success rate of 31-33%. Using NaProTechnology after failed artificial fertility treatments has a success rate of 53%. And the success rate when NaProTechnology is the initial treatment of infertility is up to 80%! 

It’s cheaper, and it’s more than twice as successful. So why isn’t everyone talking about this?! 

I’ll be completely honest; I think it’s because NaProTechnology is often brought up in a very Catholic way that turns off non-Catholic people. Emily here, Catholic and Natural Family Planning enthusiast. Yes, NaProTechnology was created by a Catholic and aligns with Catholic teachings, and that makes me super excited and proud. It works in tandem with the Creighton Model of Natural Family Planning, both of which were developed by Dr. Thomas Hilgers, founder and director of the Pope Paul VI Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction. But that, tragically, is where we lose a lot of people. I don’t want to call out specific websites or people, but when I hear Catholics talk about NaProTechnology, 90% of the time it’s Catholic-ness is brought up within the first 5 seconds. 

“NaProTechnology respects God’s design for married love.” 

“NaProTechnology aligns with the teachings of the Catholic Church.”

How about “NaProTechnology holistically supports women’s health?” 

Or even “NaProTechnology is cheaper and more effective for helping women achieve pregnancy!” 

Cheaper, more effective fertility care for women—care that is non-violent, focused on supporting the entire woman, and treats the underlying cause of her infertility—should be something we can all get behind. And it’s not like Catholics are the only game in town here; the idea of getting to the root cause of health issues rather than just treating the symptoms has been around medical care for centuries, and some non-Catholic doctors already do things like identify and treat endometriosis that’s causing infertility. 

Catholic or not, wouldn’t it just be better for women’s health if we consistently tried to find out why she’s struggling to get or stay pregnant, and treat that underlying condition? NaProTechnology has up to an 80% success rate when it’s the initial treatment; artificial fertility treatments like IVF have a success rate of 31-33%. At the very least, shouldn’t women know that and be able to make an informed decision?

And shouldn’t we want to identify and heal whatever is going wrong in her body instead of ignoring it? Isn’t that supposed to be what women’s healthcare is all about?

Yes, NaProTechnology was created by a Catholic and aligns with Catholic teaching. I think that’s awesome, and I want more people to understand that the Catholic Church views women with great inherent dignity and is on the cutting edge of women’s healthcare treatments. But NaProTechnology is also just plain amazing for women’s health, and I think our conversations should start there.

Three Steps To a Productive Conversation about IVF

So when IVF headlines inevitably pop back to the top of your Instagram feed, you can have a productive conversation by focusing on three key areas. 

1. Show compassion: Just like discussing abortion, discussing IVF effectively requires unpacking an emotionally wrought topic—one that is tied up with people’s personal stories, tragedies, and vulnerabilities. Our first aim should be to demonstrate genuine compassion for people struggling to conceive and love for those already conceived via IVF. 
2. Keep the main thing the main thing: IVF, at least as it is currently practiced, involves killing prenatal humans. And the killing of prenatal humans, including in IVF, should be illegal. Pro-life people may have a variety of other serious concerns about IVF, and we should absolutely talk about those, but we must be extremely clear that the primary, obvious, agreed-upon concern is that killing prenatal humans is wrong and should be illegal. 
3. Offer a (cheaper, easier, more effective!) alternative: When someone is experiencing infertility, medical providers should provide holistic care; they should be digging in to find the underlying cause of the infertility in order to provide treatment, instead of attempting to circumvent the problem by plopping a tiny unborn human in her body and just hoping it survives—or worse, creating multiple tiny humans and killing the “extras” (or freezing them to plausibly be killed later). NaProTechnology, a method of holistic women’s healthcare, is not only an ethical way to treat infertility, but it has more than double the success rate of artificial fertility treatments at a fraction of the cost.

Let’s work together to provide effective, holistic medical care that doesn’t kill anyone in the process. 

The post Get Ready. IVF Confusion is Coming. originally appeared at the Equal Rights Institute blog. Subscribe to our email list with the form below and get a FREE gift. Click here to learn more about our pro-life apologetics course, “Equipped for Life: A Fresh Approach to Conversations About Abortion.” 

The preceding post is the property of Emily Geiger and Rebecca Carlson (apart from quotations, which are the property of their respective owners, and works of art as credited; images are often freely available to the public,) and should not be reproduced in part or in whole without the expressed consent of the author. All content on this site is the property of Equal Rights Institute unless the post was written by a co-blogger or guest, and the content is made available for individual and personal usage. If you cite from these documents, whether for personal or professional purposes, please give appropriate citation with both the name of the authors (Emily Geiger and Rebecca Carlson) and a link to the original URL. If you’d like to repost a post, you may do so, provided you show only the first three paragraphs on your own site and link to the original post for the rest. You must also appropriately cite the post as noted above. This blog is protected by Creative Commons licensing. By viewing any part of this site, you are agreeing to this usage policy.

The post Get Ready. IVF Confusion is Coming. appeared first on Equal Rights Institute Blog - Clear Pro-Life Thinking.

Let me back up.

I grew up Catholic, went to K-12 Catholic school, the whole nine-yards. I knew that I was supposed to be pro-life, and I was pro-life, but I had spent maybe five minutes of my entire life thinking deeply about abortion. So when I went off to college, I had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into.

I went to St. Olaf College, where in the fall of 2016, the students staged a massive protest against our local pro-life pregnancy center. The pregnancy center was hosting their annual fundraising banquet in the ballrooms of our student union, and when the students found out, they lined the hallways waving signs, trying to stop community members from entering and raising money to provide free resources to pregnant and parenting families.

Yeah, it took me about two seconds to realize that publicly identifying as pro-life was social suicide.

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

And when I finally did identify myself and join the pro-life club (to be honest, mostly because I really wanted to be friends with this girl who asked me to go with her, definitely not because I had suddenly become passionate about abortion), I quickly realized that I was in over my head. I somehow wound up representing the club in an interview, and I was thrown multiple questions about abortion that I didn’t know how to answer. I remember frantically googling in the bathroom “What if a pregnant woman is dying? Is abortion necessary?” (answer: when you define abortion the medical way, then sometimes yes) and stumbling over my words as I tried to explain that a fetus has her own body separate from the mother’s body, so “not your body, not your choice!” (which I later learned is a horribly unpersuasive response because it completely straw mans the pro-choice view).

When I found Equal Rights Institute, my life and college pro-life club changed forever, and I’m now an internationally recognized pro-life advocate who teaches pro-lifers how to understand and respond to pro-choice people in order to actually change hearts and minds about abortion.

But I often wonder: what if I could have skipped all those steps in between? What if I could have entered college already passionate about abortion, confident in my pro-life views, and knowing how to respond to the hardest pro-choice questions? And on the other hand, I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t stumbled across strong pro-life arguments in college. What about all the pro-life youth who don’t? I believe there are hundreds of thousands of pro-life youth out there like me—youth who learned that they were supposed to be pro-life, but whose belief wavered and even died completely when they were bombarded by our pro-choice culture.

That’s why I pitched Equipped for Life Academy in my job interview for ERI. Using my degree in education and experience in the classroom, I wanted to develop a curriculum for pro-life high school students to not only learn that they should be pro-life, but to know how to confidently defend and live the pro-life position throughout their lives. In a post-Roe America, there is literally no hiding from the abortion debate. I believe that it’s time to engage students in discussing abortion directly by facing the hardest pro-choice questions head-on.

Equipped for Life Academy is a unique pro-life curriculum for religious high school students like I was. Designed as a unit for any Christian school course, church youth group, homeschool class, or confirmation class, the interactive lesson plans promote engagement with the most popular pro-choice talking points of our day, giving students the tools to understand today’s abortion landscape while responding thoughtfully and compassionately to pro-choice people.

Even when those pro-choice people are in your class, too.

I see so many schools and churches that are afraid of discussing abortion for fear of alienating pro-choice students, and so many others that don’t take the time to deeply discuss abortion because they don’t think they have any pro-choice students. Even in the most conservative settings, it is common for a student or two to be secretly conflicted about abortion or outright pro-choice—but they are afraid to speak up about their views because they fear judgment. I’ve met so many students like Maria. Before I spoke at her school, her administrators told me, “Our school is 100% pro-life! There isn’t a single pro-choice student here.” But after my speech, Maria discreetly approached to thank me for demonstrating respect to pro-choice people and engaging with pro-choice arguments intelligently. She revealed that she is secretly pro-choice, but since she knows that that viewpoint isn’t accepted at her conservative school, she’d never spoken up or asked questions. But she had so many questions! And she’s seriously considering the pro-life position now that she’s heard my answers!

If we avoid discussing abortion entirely or proclaim a culture of life without fostering conversation about the issue, we miss crucial opportunities to change hearts and minds and develop confident pro-life convictions in youth who will shape the future of abortion in our world. That’s why our team has carefully crafted Equipped for Life Academy to engage students regardless of their current stance on abortion: “pro-life,” “pro-choice,” “I don’t know,” or “I don’t want to talk about it.”

I’ve also been a high school teacher, which gave me tremendous empathy for how hard all the insane demands on teachers’ time and requirements on their curriculum could make it to incorporate the pro-life teaching teenage Emily needed into their classrooms. So I built Equipped For Life Academy to be as easy as possible to teach, and to fit state education standards. The lesson plans, activities, and assessments fit right into those requirements teachers are faced with today, and the Protestant edition of Equipped for Life Academy can be used across a variety of denominational contexts. Meanwhile, the Catholic edition of Equipped for Life Academy is written to fit the National Standards and Benchmarks for Effective Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools (NSBECS) and The Cardinal Newman Society Catholic Curriculum Standards (CNSCCS).

If I had learned the why behind my pro-life views—the tools to actually understand the issue and explain my beliefs with conviction—freshman Emily wouldn’t have walked onto that college campus with her head down. I believe that we can teach our youth to be pro-life and stay pro-life even when faced with the toughest questions and the pressures of our culture, all while passionately spreading the truth about the dignity of life to their peers.

I believe Equipped for Life Academy is a game-changer for the religious education of today’s high school students. See for yourself at EquippedforLifeAcademy.com

The post The Pro-Life Message I Wish I’d Heard in High School originally appeared at the Equal Rights Institute blog. Subscribe to our email list with the form below and get a FREE gift. Click here to learn more about our pro-life apologetics course, “Equipped for Life: A Fresh Approach to Conversations About Abortion.” 

The preceding post is the property of Emily Geiger. (apart from quotations, which are the property of their respective owners, and works of art as credited; images are often freely available to the public,) and should not be reproduced in part or in whole without the expressed consent of the author. All content on this site is the property of Equal Rights Institute unless the post was written by a co-blogger or guest, and the content is made available for individual and personal usage. If you cite from these documents, whether for personal or professional purposes, please give appropriate citation with both the name of the author (Emily Geiger) and a link to the original URL. If you’d like to repost a post, you may do so, provided you show only the first three paragraphs on your own site and link to the original post for the rest. You must also appropriately cite the post as noted above. This blog is protected by Creative Commons licensing. By viewing any part of this site, you are agreeing to this usage policy.

The post The Pro-Life Message I Wish I’d Heard in High School appeared first on Equal Rights Institute Blog - Clear Pro-Life Thinking.