The Abortion Clinic Escort Who Defended Me

This article is a shortened version of a story published by The Pro-Life Review, an Equal Rights Institute Affiliate Group dedicated to “persuasively arguing against abortion using the written word.” We highly encourage you to check out the full piece here and subscribe to their blog for more inspirational stories, abortion news reporting, and persuasive essays arguing against abortion.

This post was written by a pro-life sidewalk counselor who preferred to remain anonymous.

The first time I sidewalk counseled at Kay’s abortion facility, she blocked my path.

Kay was a volunteer clinic escort, meaning it was her job to escort women from their cars into the abortion facility. I was there to calmly and kindly invite women into conversation, and offer them a card with information about free pregnancy resources and after-abortion support. Kay was there to stop me, or at least to stop women from getting the information I offered them. Every time a woman pulled up, Kay walked out to the woman’s car, stepped in front of her as she got out to make it hard for me to talk with her, and led her away into the facility as quickly as she could. That certainly made things difficult, but I still managed to get into a longer conversation with one woman. 

Photo by Lorie Shaull

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes

Listener Mail: Can You Be a Professional Musician and Pro-life?

Professional Musician Thumbnail

MP3 Download | 0:57:13

Trent Horn forwarded us a great question, so Josh brought ERI Club Coach/Video Editor Joshua Head onto the show, as Joshua is also a professional musician. Joshua went above and beyond, creating a list of tips for musicians in college as well as post-college.

This is a pretty niche topic, and admittedly, it sometimes turned into two musicians nerding out with each other. But it was a great question, and we wanted to be able to point people somewhere to get tips on this. Enjoy the conversation.

Trent and Laura Horn’s announcement and a prayer seeking the intercession of Venerable Aloysius Schwartz for Laura’s healing:
https://youtu.be/Ilj3CDGGkQg

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How to Have Better Conversations About IVF

MP3 Download | 1:18:40

ERI’s Affiliate Groups have been busy working with their coaches on practical dialogue tips for talking about IVF, now that it’s in the news more often.

First, Emily and Rebecca present to Josh for the first time what our groups have been working on. Afterward, they had a more personal discussion comparing and contrasting their intuitions about IVF. It turned into a really cool discussion between two open-minded Protestants and one open-minded Catholic having an ego-free discussion about where their views seem to differ.

Yes, Abby Johnson, We Do Care About Ending Abortion

Abby Johnson said in a recent interview that organizations like ERI (and like most other pro-life organizations) that do want to prosecute doctors who perform abortions but do not want to prosecute women who have abortions must not really want to end abortion. Her exact words were, “I just find it hard anymore to pretend that these groups actually are interested in ending abortion.” She’s wrong. Let’s talk about it.

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

Genuine or Performed? Acting Skills in Honest Dialogue

MP3 Download | 1:29:48

The Equipped for Life Podcast is back! After a long hiatus due to the production of Equipped for Life Academy, we’ve begun recording new episodes. We also have some old episodes in the archives we’ll be publishing as well. We loved this episode as our first episode back though.

After introducing Rebecca Carlson and welcoming her to be a second co-host on the podcast, Josh and Emily discuss their common backgrounds in music and musical theater, and how that affects our dialogue.

This leads to a listener mail question on how Emily is able to come across as spontaneous as she does even when saying memorized responses.

This leads to a FASCINATING discussion on, in the situation that we’re talking to a pro-choice person, whether it’s inherently deceptive to add fake thinking pauses, among other things, that actors commonly do when performing.