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.
