At a speaking gig last week, someone asked me a really good question: “What do you do when a pro-choice person says something, and it’s so dumb you don’t even know how to respond?” Sometimes an argument can be hard to rebut because it’s so smart. But sometimes an argument can be hard to figure out how to respond to because it feels so obviously bad to you that you’re not even sure how to explain why it’s bad other than to just say “Duh!”
Some of you might be thinking at this point, “That’s every conversation with pro-choice people! Their whole argument is that dumb!” If that’s you, I think you’re wrong on that. But if that’s your view, it also means this topic is even more relevant to you than to everybody else— it applies to literally every conversation you have with a pro-choice person.
But that’s not where the person who asked me the question last week was coming from. She knew a lot of the strongest pro-choice arguments, and she had a bunch of experience having smart, mutual, respectful conversations with pro-choice people. But occasionally, someone would say something that just left her speechless, like “I know it’s a human being, I just don’t care,” “A fetus isn’t biologically alive,” or “Yeah, it should be legal to kill toddlers too.”
If you’ve ever talked with a pro-choice person about abortion, you may have run into something similar—something that makes you want to say, “That feels so obviously wrong that I don’t know what to do to help you see it—it’s just obvious!”
I have two different responses in situations like that, but the first step is the same either way.
Step 1: Clarify
Clarifying what you’re hearing your interlocutor say is pretty much never a bad idea, but it’s particularly important when you’re thinking what you heard is crazy.
This could sound like: “I want to make sure I understand where you’re coming from. Is it ok if I repeat back what I’m hearing you say and then ask you to tell me if I’m right or not?”
Or, depending on how far into the conversation you are and how much rapport you’ve built, it could sound like: “Wait, just to be super clear—you’re saying that to help curb overpopulation we should make it legal for parents to kill their toddlers if they want?”
If you can think of two possible things they might mean and you’re not sure which one they’re going for, it can also be really helpful to offer them both options. For instance, “I want to make sure I understand where you’re coming from, and I can think of two different things you might mean by that. Do you mean you know the fetus is a human being biologically, like that it’s a living human organism, or do you mean something more philosophical—like you know it’s a person with equal rights, you just don’t care?”
Sometimes clarifying will be enough—either because you’ll find out that you were misunderstanding them and they didn’t actually mean the crazy thing to begin with, or because the process of clarifying gave them a chance to reconsider and adjust.
But if you go through the clarification step and what they’re saying still sounds beyond-the-pale crazy to you, the next step depends on the answer to this question: Would almost all pro-choice people agree with you that what the person is saying is crazy? Is it obvious to everyone, or just obvious to you (or people on your side)?
The rest of this post will talk about the really extreme cases where it’s so obviously wrong that the vast majority of pro-choice people would agree that it’s crazy. My next post will talk about the cases where it feels extremely obvious to you, but you know a bunch of pro-choice people wouldn’t see it that way.
Step 2: When most pro-choice people would agree with you
If you trot out a toddler and the pro-choice person you’re talking with says that yes, it should be legal to kill toddlers, let me assure you that the vast, vast (vast!) majority of pro-choice people agree with you that that’s obviously bad. In fact, even the person you’re talking with might agree with you that that’s obviously bad. Sometimes, without realizing it, people say things they don’t actually think because they feel trapped.
This happened to me once at a high school debate tournament. I don’t remember what the debate topic was (it wasn’t abortion), but my opponent based her argument on consequentialism, which (roughly) says that the end justifies the means. So during cross-examination, when it was my turn to ask her questions to try to poke holes in her argument, I brought up things like the torturous and often deadly medical experiments that Nazis performed on prisoners, without consent or anesthesia. The Nazis were (in part) trying to accomplish some genuinely good goals, like learning how to more effectively save people’s lives. There could even have been some particular experiments where mathematically, more lives were saved as a result of what was learned in the experiment than were killed in the experiment. So I asked her whether the consequentialist view she was defending meant that what the Nazis did was okay. And…she said yes.
I got a sweet, soft-spoken fifteen-year-old girl to say that the Nazis medically experimenting on prisoners was morally permissible. I spent most of my rebuttal pointing out exactly how horribly and obviously false that was, and then when it came time for my opponent’s rebuttal she stood up, started to cry, forfeited the debate, and said “I just want to be really clear that I don’t actually think what the Nazis did was okay.” She hadn’t said yes to my question because that was what she actually thought; she said yes because she felt trapped. I had backed her into a corner, she didn’t know how to get out, and she froze.
In a competitive debate setting, that was a kind of victory (though I definitely felt conflicted about it). In a setting where your goal is to win the argument, getting your opponent flustered so that they say something stupid and then feel like they have to stand by it can help you do that. But outside of very specific settings like competitive debate tournaments, winning debates is a terrible goal. It might help you feel intellectually and morally superior, but it won’t change minds or save lives, and it’s also just not a loving or intellectually virtuous thing to be trying to do.
People can’t change their minds while they’re feeling defensive and unsafe. If you want a chance to change someone’s mind, you need them to feel safe in the conversation with you. That means you need them not to feel like you’re trying to trick them into saying something stupid so you can pounce on it. You need them to feel like they can reconsider and edit what they said without you making them feel stupid. For that to happen, obviously you need to not actually be trying to trap them or win the debate or make them feel stupid. But often, it takes more than that: often, you also need to go out of your way to be super clear that you’re not trying to do those things.
So: if the pro-choice person you’re talking with says something that’s really obviously wrong, even to most pro-choice people, one good step is to check whether they’re feeling trapped. You can check for that by saying something like:
“There’s a thing that can sometimes happen in abortion conversations like this, and I wonder if it might be happening here—sometimes people can end up feeling trapped, feeling like they have to stick to something they said not because it’s what they actually think but because they feel like they don’t know what to say or how their argument could go if they take it back. I’m not saying that’s what’s happening, but in case it is, I just want to be super clear that I won’t think any less of you if you ever want to edit anything you’ve said—we’re both talking off the cuff here. And also just to be super clear, I don’t at all think you have to be pro-life if you say it’s not ok to kill toddlers. I know some really strong pro-choice arguments that are absolutely consistent with saying it’s not ok to kill toddlers, and I’m happy to give them to you.”
If you notice a pattern of people feeling trapped, or feeling like they’re not sure where you’re leading them in your abortion conversations, one good thing to try adjusting is to ask fewer questions. If you’re genuinely trying to make sure you’re understanding something they just said, definitely still ask those clarifying questions (offer them multiple options if you can!). But when it’s your turn to make your own argument, put periods at the ends of your sentences instead of question marks. That can help people avoid feeling like they’re being asked to agree to something without knowing where it’s going.
If you’ve clarified what they said and gently asked whether they’re feeling trapped and they still stand by it, one last move you can try is to point out that most pro-choice people are on your side on this one. If even that doesn’t shift anything, it might be time to end the conversation. I might say something like, “Okay, to be honest I’m not really sure where to go from here. I think we might not have enough common ground in some other areas to be able to have a conversation about abortion. I guess I’d just want to invite you to reconsider your view that killing toddlers is okay—I think the vast majority of pro-choice people would agree with me that it’s obviously wrong to kill toddlers.” I repeat what they said back to them a couple times to let it linger with them and give them as much chance as possible to reconsider later, and then send them on their way.
In my experience, at least in in-person conversations, it’s pretty rare that a pro-choice person says something that egregious and stands by it even after I clarify what they said and check whether they’re feeling trapped. It happens, just not in most conversations. What does happen in most conversations is that pro-choice people say something that sounds so obviously false to a lot of pro-life people that it can be hard to figure out how to respond. Next post, I’ll talk about what to do with things pro-choice people say all the time that feel so crazy to you you’re not sure where to start.
The post “What To Do When It’s So Dumb You Don’t Know What To Say” 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.”
