I sometimes get requests to do interviews for local students. You can read one of them here at LifeNews.com. I just did another one, and this is my response to two of his questions:

Student: What do you think is the best way to convince those against abortion that it’s taking away a life?

I think it’s very important to be able to communicate the philosophical argument I summarized here.

Screenshot from the TED talk I linked to.

For some people, seeing videos about human development can be helpful. National Geographic’s In the Womb and this TED talk can be very persuasive.

There are some people that don’t see abortion as something that takes life unless they see graphic images of what it does to babies. I think you should warn somebody before showing them, and give them the option of choosing not to view them. I think the best video for this is Stephanie Grey’s “Abortion: Before & After” video. It shows both fetal development images and then abortion images from babies that are the same age.

Student: What challenges have you faced in helping fight abortion?

It’s really challenging to get certain churches to partner with us and fight abortion. I can understand why some would be concerned about certain things that some pro-life groups do, but we’re not one of those groups. If they learned more about us, they should have no problem partnering with us and praying in front of Planned Parenthood, or training Christians to be good ambassadors for Christ and then mentoring them as they talk to pro-choice people on college campuses. Unfortunately a lot of Christians are either ignorant, fearful or apathetic about this issue, and fighting those three things is an ongoing frustration for me. You can hear me speak more about those three problems in depth during this sermon audio.

One of the big challenges of talking to young people on college campuses is that some have embraced moral relativism, the view that morals are subjective and that there is no such thing as an objective moral rule, only preferences. This worldview is already outdated and disrespected by the majority of modern philosophers, but sadly young college students have not all caught up to that. Which means I get to spend long conversations sometimes trying to demonstrate that some things like rape are objectively morally wrong, because if I can’t do that, it’s highly unlikely I will change their mind about something less obvious like abortion.