No, it has nothing to do with a super-extremist pro-choice position or some high-octane philosophical argument. It wasn’t even an “open mouth, insert foot” moment by another pro-life activist. Instead, it was a display of painful, low-level ignorance.

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

ERI’s staff was doing an outreach together with a club on a college campus (which will remain nameless to protect the guilty). Our poll table was a variation on the usual “should abortion remain legal” prompt: “Should Third-Trimester Abortions Be Legal?”

As it began to rain, we moved our table from the outdoors to our fallback space in the student union. And, I kid you not, I heard students conversing as we passed:

“How many trimesters are there in pregnancy, again?”

“Four, I think.”

So yes, some of the adults we were there to have dialogues about abortion with didn’t know the most elementary facts about pregnancy.

Obviously, broad ignorance about human reproduction and abortion is a generally bad thing, and especially in a time when multiple states are voting on abortion. But it should also specifically affect how we go into a conversation with a random person on the street, in which we don’t know anything about their knowledge or background.

You Probably Know More than Most People about Abortion

Here’s the thing: if you have spent time studying the issue of abortion or training as a pro-life advocate, you probably do know more than most people about abortion. Sure, those college students should have known there are three trimesters in pregnancy. But generally, abortion isn’t the kind of thing people are taught about; they need to seek out information. And if people don’t take it upon themselves to seek out accurate information, they can end up thinking all sorts of things about abortion that simply aren’t true. People genuinely believe, for example, that babies whose mothers are denied abortion go into the foster system as a matter of course (read here, they don’t).

Generally, becoming educated about abortion is the result of an intentional choice to seek out relevant information. That means, if you’ve chosen to study the issue, you will often have an information advantage over your dialogue partner. This isn’t inherently a good or a bad thing, but recognizing an information imbalance changes how you should approach a dialogue. In some ways, it means you have more work to do, because there are things you “should” be able to take for granted that you can’t, like a basic working knowledge of human reproduction. But it also means you have the opportunity to give people more information to work with as they assess the morality of abortion—and I think it benefits the pro-life side when people get more information about abortion.

Don’t Assume They’re Idiots

This should go without saying, but it needs to be said anyway: just because some people are shockingly, magnificently unaware of important details around abortion (or other issues), that doesn’t mean it’s reasonable to infer that the person in front of you is ignorant, let alone that they’re stupid (after all, even extremely smart people are ignorant about most of human knowledge). Even if 80 percent of the population doesn’t know fact X (a wild overestimation to make a point), don’t go into your conversation prepared to pull out your chalkboard and start lecturing on X and how you need to understand it before you can form a reasonable position. On one hand, do you understand how ridiculous you’d look if you found one of the 20 percent who knows X as well as you do? On the other hand, even if your dialogue partner is in the 80 percent, no one likes to be talked down to, and starting with that will make your dialogue that much more difficult.

Instead, while you should be aware that people you talk to likely don’t know as much about abortion as you, this should just be background information tucked away in your mind. Use it to understand when you do need to take a step back and legitimately teach about something, but don’t try to turn your dialogues into classroom lectures.

The Difference Between Steering and Guiding a Conversation

I once had a seasoned pro-lifer remark to me that, because he had both an informational and an argumentative advantage, he could basically steer a dialogue in whatever direction he wanted. He wasn’t saying that as some kind of a boast, but as a point of frustration; he didn’t want dialogues to be academic exercises for the people involved, but a real opportunity for people to engage and change each other’s minds.

Have you ever seen something like this happen (perhaps while watching a debate on social media)? One person knows their stuff better, and they clearly “win.” Even the person they’re talking to admits they don’t have a response—but they’re not convinced. Maybe they think some trick has been played on them, or that if they were better prepared they’d have a good enough argument to win, or that their position is “obviously” right and as long as the right people confirm their view they don’t need to worry. Whatever it is, it didn’t matter that one side “won,” that the person with an information advantage could steer the debate wherever they wanted or walk all over their opponent; they still didn’t change the other person’s mind.

This is a hidden trap of having informational superiority: if you deploy it incorrectly, it will actually make it harder to convince someone. You can steer things wherever you want, but if your interlocutor is merely a passenger, they’ll probably walk away and revert to their starting opinion. The task of convincing someone through dialogue is to bring them with you; you need their cooperation, their buy-in.

You can use your rapport with your dialogue partner to gain opportunities to teach them facts they may not know, and, by teaching them in the right way, you’ll reinforce the rapport you have with them. If you’re talking with someone because they care enough to want to find the truth, even if they expect that the truth is pro-choice, they’ve bought into the process. By patiently providing the truth, you have an opportunity to guide the conversation without steering it.

What do I mean by “guiding” rather than “steering”? Here’s an example from one of my dialogues:

I was talking to a pro-choice college guy, and his responses leaned into bodily rights, so I let the conversation go that direction. I started asking him some of the “stock” questions about the sorts of things that must hold true if “my body, my choice” is taken seriously. Pretty quickly, at the first thalidomide thought experiment, he became uneasy with the implications of the pro-choice position. He refused to “bite the bullet,” but I had a feeling that he wasn’t convinced about the pro-life position, even though he didn’t like where the pro-choice position he held was leading.

So, I offered him a way out. I explained that there was another way that a lot of pro-choice people choose to ground their view that abortion is morally acceptable, and I offered to talk about personhood instead. He agreed, and he was visibly relieved. We got to continue the conversation for several more minutes before he needed to go to class, and we had the opportunity to talk about fetal development and the Equal Rights Argument. What’s more, he asked to take the ERI outreach brochure with him when he went!

I can’t say that I definitely changed his mind on abortion. But because I guided the conversation by trying to understand him as a person, utilizing the fact that I knew more about abortion to allow the conversation to go longer, I’m confident in saying I made a lot more progress than I would have if I let him walk away frustrated and unconvinced after I “won” on bodily rights. If I had taken the conversation where I wanted it to go without paying attention to the guy I was talking to, I could have steered it to grounds I was comfortable on and he wasn’t, but without accomplishing anything. The difference between steering and guiding is that I made the guy I was talking to an agent in the dialogue to the fullest extent possible—and I guided it as needed to make that happen.

Understanding People Helps You Understand How to Use Information

What’s the main takeaway? As always, we want you to treat the person you’re talking to, first and foremost, as a person. When talking with a person, you should be seeking to understand them. And when you understand the person you’re talking to, you can accurately assess how much they know, what else they need to know to form a more complete view, and how you can work together with them to guide that process of discovery.

The post Your Dialogue Partner Might Know Less than You Expect 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.” 

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