I’ve never been very good at a traditional ERI-style outreach or active sidewalk counseling. I’ve always struggled to strike up a conversation with a random stranger. No matter how many times I rehearse an opening line, when the moment comes, my voice chokes off before I can get a word out. I literally feel my throat and diaphragm physically seize. I’ve not completely given up on trying to clear this hurdle, but I’ve had to accept that my social anxiety is a real barrier to certain types of pro-life advocacy.
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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.”