Monday, September 5, 2022

March For Life YOUTH 2022 Emily Albrecht Talk

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with transcript 

 

okay fantastic i am really young in case you didn't
already notice that i am fresh out of college and so that means that i get asked the question
a lot what are you doing for a living right it happens every two seconds if you're like
in your last year of school anywhere you get the same exact question all the time i'm like getting my hair done and the
lady in the salon says to me what do you do for a living and i spent months
hating that question because i work for a national pro-life
organization okay i talk about abortion all day every day so how do i answer the
question what do you do for a living in a way that's gonna start our conversation off on the right foot if
she's pro-choice because in all likelihood she is pro-choice and so i want to talk about
abortion that's what i do but i want our conversation to go well and so this is what i finally settled on
if someone says to me emily what do you do for a living i say well
i help pro-life people to be less weird
and every single time they do exactly what you just did they kind of turn their heads sideways a little bit and they look at me with the
squinty eye face and they're like what does that mean and i say well i help pro-life people to
make more good arguments and fewer bad ones and i help us to connect relationally
with people who are different from us so that we can actually engage with their ideas
it's a really strange job i recognize that but i think it is so needed in our
society today because in case you haven't noticed our society is
horrendously bad at actually engaging with people who think differently from
us like it is quite frankly been depressing to me just watch how polarized our society has become
like abortion has always been a difficult topic to talk about it's emotionally complicated i think it's
ethically and philosophically complicated which we'll talk a lot about tonight but these days
it seems like we can't have a conversation about anything like i'm really aware that there's no
good examples quite honestly in the media of adults who can disagree with each other respectfully and productively
they usually just end up screaming at each other either literally or in all caps on the internet and they are
attacking each other's character rather than the actual ideas that are coming out of their mouths
i think it's a major problem on every side of politics these days and i want to see that conversation get better but
if i'm being totally honest with you i get particularly peeved
when i see people on my side who are engaging in that kind of
negative behavior because i think it is hurting our movement i think it is hurting us when
there are pro-life people or conservative people or christians or whatever
who are engaging in that kind of negative hatred towards people on the other side and here's the problem it
happens a lot i see it all the time i come to conferences like this and when a whole
lot of people who think similarly all get in a room together sometimes bad things can happen
sometimes we start to talk about the other side as if they're not there and we can talk honestly and we talk
about how we think they're idiots and we talk honestly about the kinds of frustrations we see
when we're on tick-tock or we're listening to podcasts or whatever like we all love to live in confirmation bias
we love to only listen to the people or watch the things that we know we're gonna agree with as a matter of fact we
love to watch things that dunk on the other side we love to watch things that make us
think the other side is dumb bad or our enemy
there's a lot of people and things that we like to take in who do that and i think it is really bad for you
like i will go as far as to say that i actually think it is hurting your soul you should not be listening to people
who make you think the other side is dumb bad or the enemy
because it is a lot more complicated than that folks like if i'm talking to a pro-choice person okay i'm very pro-life
i work for a national pro-life organization if i am talking to a pro-choice person
i don't think that she's dumb i really don't i think that she has a
lot of reasons that brought her to this particular position maybe some things that have happened in her life maybe a
worldview thing there's always a lot of compassion for women involved she's a lot of good reasons for why she
came there i think my reasons are better and i'd like the chance to be able to tell her why
but if i treat her like she's dumb you can bet i'm never gonna get the chance to do that
and i certainly don't think that she's my enemy and even if i did like
that would do us literally zero good in solving absolutely any of the controversial issues in our society
today and the same is true in reverse like if you're pro-choice and you treat me like
you think i'm dumb or bad or the enemy you're not going to be able to make me
change my mind either what we need is less hate and more
dialogue in our society and i'm trying to encourage that in the pro-life movement i think we need more dialogue
among friends and less debate among strangers on the internet i'm trying to help the pro-life movement
to be like what i think jesus would be if he was here today talking about today's controversial
issues i think he would be what colossians 4 5-6 says
it says conduct yourself with wisdom towards outsiders making the most of the
opportunity let your speech always be with grace as though seasoned with salt
so that you will know how you should respond to each person that's how i think jesus would be if he
was here today he would conduct himself with wisdom towards outsiders making the most of the opportunity he would not
just avoid talking about abortion because it's too controversial no you wouldn't do that i see way too
many christians doing that today but he would speak about it with wisdom and with grace and here's my favorite
part he would know how he should respond to each person
he wouldn't just respond to some stereotype he has in his head of what the idiots on the other side think
now he would get to know the pro-choice person standing right in front of him
and what their needs are and their concerns are and their arguments are and their worldview and
all of those things he would get to know that person and he would respond to that
because that's how people change their mind that's what happened
quite honestly on my college campus let me back up i used to be absolutely terrified
to tell anyone that i was pro-life i bet many of you have been in this boat before if you're not there right now
i grew up catholic i went to k-12 catholic school whole nine yards and i
knew like sort of that when i went off to college that was going to be a place where my beliefs
would be challenged but i had really no concept of what i was actually getting myself
into i went off to st olaf college in northfield minnesota of all places if
you know where minnesota is and just to paint a picture for you my freshman year the fall of my freshman
year our local pregnancy resource center amazing place offers free resources for
pregnant and parenting people in the community our local pregnancy resource center was hosting their annual fundraising banquet
and they decided to do it on my college campus they had like rented out a space on the college campus and that's what
they were going to do it and when the students on my campus found out about that
they managed to organize and insane number of students to line the hallways
of our entire student union with signs screaming at the mostly elderly members of the
community that had come to support this pro-life resource is anyone shocked that i was terrified
to tell people i was pro-life when that's what i walked into so i kind
of kept my mouth shut until about january of my freshman year when my one
good catholic pro-life friend her name's meredith when meredith happened to see a poster
for the pro-life club there actually was a pro-life club on my college campus it was being
single-handedly run by one senior girl she was like doing her best
one woman pro-life show style but how much can you really do when like
that is your campus and the whole campus is against you and so she
put up this one poster for the pro-life club and meredith saw it and she dragged
me to their meeting kicking and screaming and nonetheless this senior girl was absolutely thrilled when we
showed up because we had just single-handedly tripled the size of her club from one to three
so the three of us in in this one meeting decided that that spring we were gonna try to do some stuff and i'll be
totally honest with you every single thing that we tried that spring failed epically
it was a complete disaster i remember that one specific week that spring we
put up a hallway display we reserved this hallway in the student union and we were going to put up this giant pro-life
display that we made ourselves we were super proud of it and we put it up and it was vandalized 13 times in one
week and when i say vandalized i mean destroyed
whole thing is destroyed ripped down we have to reprint the entire display and put it back up 13 times i don't even
want to know how much money we spent that week on that display out of our own pockets mind you because we had no money
i would submit a bias report to administration every single time our display got vandalized saying like um
hello students are vandalizing our stuff and they're kind of not supposed to do that
and my reports would basically go into a black hole like i'm i don't know if anyone ever
read them i'm sure they're in a file cabinet somewhere it was
completely aggravating so end of my freshman year comes along and suddenly
that senior girl graduates right and so i found myself as the new president of the pro-life club
basically by default and so that summer my very tiny club and i realized that something had to change
like clearly this was not working and our campus desperately needed to
hear the pro-life message but what we were doing wasn't reaching them and suddenly one
day in the middle of july i got the email that just like literally dropped out of the sky i have no other way of
explaining it because it was the email that introduced me to equal rights institute which is the organization i
now work for okay so i got this email saying hey there's a national pro-life organization
that is dedicated to helping pro-life people actually reach pro-choice people
and i was like wow do i need that and so i took my very tiny club through
their online training materials through their training and how to actually talk to pro-choice people and early that fall
of my second year of college we decided to take that material and go out and actually start having
conversations with pro-choice students we would literally set up a table in like the cafeteria area of our school
and it would say should abortion remain legal on it and trust me students wanted to voice
their opinion in that question and so hundreds of students started coming up to our table and voicing their
opinion in that little poll and then engaging in conversation with one of us fast forward my last year of college we
have been consistently doing this setting up a table having these conversations almost weekly every single
week for the next three years and our entire campus
changed my club like exploded in size pro-lifers had come out of the woodwork there had
always been pro-life students on my campus but they like me were too afraid to tell anyone
and they saw that there were other pro-lifers here and that these pro-lifers were having an impact
and they wanted to join us and not only that but we had pro-choice students who had changed their mind about abortion
after talking to one of my club members and they joined our club even more importantly
to me though i cannot tell you how many students i talked to whose perceptions about my
club completely changed like this is an exact conversation i had at least 500 times i'm wrapping up talking to a
pro-choice person and they say to me something like wow um
i don't really know what i think right now i need to take some time to like process this
but i just want you to know i really respect you
like i have never heard such an intelligent and loving pro-life argument before and
i used to hate you guys like it was a miracle if i didn't walk past your table
and not stop and punch one of you someone actually said that to my face that it was a miracle if they didn't
walk past my table and not someone punch one of us and i was like thank you i'm glad you didn't punch me but now
i actually stopped and talked to you and i found out that you are nothing
like i thought and i want to tell all of my pro-choice friends to come and talk to you too
because not only do i respect your right to be here having these conversations
i'm so glad you're here having these conversations because i think every student needs to actually listen to what
you guys have to say my senior year vandalism ended
we had won vandalism my entire last year of college my freshman year my first year we had
had 13 vandalisms in one week okay my senior year we had
one the whole year and when it happened i submitted my bias report to administration because i am basically
the queen of writing bias reports at this point and i got a personal email back from them
within 30 minutes apologizing
that i was continuing to experience this kind of vandalism letting me know that they had looked at the security camera
footage they had already identified the student who had done it and they were putting that student through the
disciplinary process in 30 minutes
my first year of college administration wouldn't give me the time of day and my last year
we had become the most respected and professional student organization on our campus i had never talked to administration
directly at that table but i watched them walk by more times than i could count they were listening
in on conversations and they were hearing from pro-choice students what was happening and suddenly
we were taken seriously that local pregnancy center you know the
one that got insanely protested my first year of college they came back
to campus my last year they had had their fundraising banquet elsewhere the years in between shocking
i know but my last year they decided to come back and there was not a single student who
protested it my campus completely changed
and i don't take credit for that it was all of my club members
sitting there for hundreds of hours actually getting to know the pro-choice students on my campus
actually listening to them understanding what their concerns were and their ideas it was them doing this
it was them loving the students in front of them and that is what the pro-life movement needs to do
if we're gonna actually reach pro-choice people because i think there's a literal catastrophe in the pro-life movement
that today's pro-life people do not understand pro-choice people i don't think they understand where
they're actually coming from or the kinds of arguments that they're making because pro-life and poetry's people often speak two different languages okay
it's like pro-life person says a and pro-choice person hears b or virtuous person says x and probably
person hears why it's kind of like our brains do google translate have you ever seen one of those really
funny youtube videos where someone takes the lyrics to a famous song like let it go and then they translate it from like
english to french and french to spanish and spanish to manor chinese and then back to english and then someone sings it and it's hilarious because google
translate gets it wrong i think that's exactly what our brains do
when we're having conversation with someone who thinks very differently from us i think there's a second layer problem
here too which is that pro-life people too often are stuck using religious
arguments we don't live in a theocracy folks i do
believe that the bible is pro-life fully believe that but that is not going to help
because we don't make laws based on bible verses we all know this
so if you're talking to a pro-choice christian be my guest i have a really fun like little syllogism that you can
use it's from my friend scott klusendorf it goes like this human beings are intrinsically valuable because they're
made in god's image it is wrong to shed innocent blood the unborn are also human beings their farts
wrong shed their blood if you're talking to a pro-choice christian go for it i have never used that literally once
because i don't talk to that many professed christians but i think sometimes pro-lifers seem to
think that christianity is going to help them to be able to sell the pro-life position it's kind of like if you were
talking to a muslim person and they were trying to convince you
that fasting during the month of ramadan should be legally mandated for all
adults in the country you'd be like that's interesting okay tell me more why why do you think that
and if they started quoting verses from the quran to you you would say okay i totally understand
why you think that you should be fasting during the month of ramadan i get that that makes total sense to me but i don't
think that applies to me because i don't believe in the quran
like that totally tracks for all of us in this room right so then why when someone says i'm pro-choice do so many
pro-life people respond back with well did you know that psalm 139 says that god met you in your mother's womb and
then jeremiah 1 5 says that god knew you before time began and then in the new testament we have second trimester john
the baptist who was kicking in his mother's womb at the sight of first trimester jesus and the pro-choice person is like i
don't believe in your book okay i think the bible was written 2000 years ago by people who heard voices in
their heads that is not helpful and even if you come across like you're only pro-life for
religious reasons that isn't even going to help a pro-choice christian because they know we don't live in a theocracy
and so they know that it doesn't really matter what the bible has to say about abortion for our laws
and that is why we need a completely secular argument against abortion we
need to understand where the average pro-choice person is coming from and we need to be able to respond to them in a
secular way and that's what i'm here to teach you tonight pro-choice people say a lot of phrases a
lot of slogans come out all the time and some of them can sound really really uh stupid
like people will say no one knows when life begins or an embryo isn't alive
now usually pro-life people have this inclination to just launch in to a
biology monologue please do not do that that is like the least helpful thing
that you could do right now the very first thing the single most important thing if you take nothing else
away from me talking this is it the single most important thing that you
need to do when someone says no one knows when life begins is ask a clarification question this is what i
say i say i want to understand your view but i'm not sure what you meant
when you said no one knows what life begins did you mean that no one knows when biological life begins or did you mean
something more philosophical like we don't know when a person begins to exist
i've asked that exact clarification question in literally thousands of conversations with pro-choice people on
college campuses do you want to know what percentage of people said the former that they were
talking about biology like less than five percent
most pro-choice people today are very clear about the biology of the unborn they got that already they are
making a much more advanced claim they're talking about when an entity becomes a person
when it becomes the kind of thing that should have rights under the law and so if you start going off in a biology
diatribe while they were talking about philosophy they're gonna tune you out because you clearly don't understand
what they're actually talking about the single most important thing you can do is ask this clarification question
now if you are talking to the five percent that are talking about biology i got you we're gonna go talk about biology for
like two seconds but please do not think that this is where most purchased people are because it's not then we're going to
talk about philosophy so if someone says no i am literally talking about biology i don't think we know when biological
life begins there are three things that you need to know about the unborn
they are living they are human and they are whole we're going to break those down one at a
time living human and whole so the unborn are all alive because they have the characteristics of living
things which are three they are growing through cellular reproduction they are metabolizing food into energy
and they are reacting to stimuli now there is debate amongst biologists
about if an entity has only two of those three things there is genuine debate about whether or
not it is biologically alive as soon as it has the third thing the debate is over guys
it is biologically alive that means nothing about whether it should have any value that's not what we're talking
about we're talking about is it biologically alive okay next one the unborn are human because
living things reproduce after their own kind only we all know this okay two cows cannot
get together and have a duck it's just not how that works all right
we also know that the unborn have uniquely human dna this is something that pro-lifers love
to bring up all the time it is true i don't think it's that helpful most of the time pro-life people
bring it up because remember i don't think portrait people are talking about biology most of the time but it is true
so if you are talking about biology feel free to bring it up the unborn do have uniquely human dna
the unborn are whole organisms because now if a pro-choice person is confused about
the biology this is usually where the confusion is because they'll often say to me
something like okay i get that it's alive and it has human dna but so does a sperm cell
sperm cell is alive it has human dna and you don't think sperm cells are sacred i understand the confusion okay that
is because the unborn are not merely part of a body like a skin cell or a sperm cell is in other words this is a
confusion between parts and holes a sperm cell is a part of a body it is a
part of an organism like if you are a man in this room your sperm cell is a part of the organism that is you my skin
cell is part of an organism that is me okay the unborn is its own organism
i did not make up science terms i don't like know why they decided to classify
it that way but that is the way science classifies itself okay so the unborn are their own
organisms nothing about value just it's an organism folks i think one of the reasons that
pro-choice people often get confused about this is because they think of human development kind of like a
construction project like a car imagine that you work at a car factory
and you and a bunch of your friends go out after work for a beer and you have a super philosophical conversation about
when the thing that you are building is actually a car and i know a lot of people that was have
this conversation for several hours because they have way too much time on their hands so we can imagine there's multiple sides
to this debate right so there's one person that says well it's when the engine goes in the car like the engine
is the heart and soul of the car so when the engine goes in then it's a car and there's another person who says no it's
when the wheels go on the car because without wheels it can't move anywhere and that's like what a car is designed
to do so when the wheels go on then it's a car and there's another person that says oh no it's at the very end when you
can turn the key in the ignition you can drive it off the assembly line then it's a car
i guarantee you right now that there is no one in this debate who
is claiming we have a car when the very first two pieces of steel are welded together
that is ridiculous and that is how i think pro-choice people often
see pro-life people because they're like i could have sympathy for someone who says halfway
through pregnancy it's a human but really guys like you're picking the first possible
moment i get why that seems weird okay but here's the problem the unborn are not
constructed like cars they develop themselves from within
that's really hard to explain because there's not much out here in like our world that operates the way the unborn
do the best analogy i have is a polaroid picture if you've ever played around with like a
polaroid camera the moment that you take the photo the moment the shutter goes off
the image exists you just can't see it yet
all it needs are nutrients in the proper environment for the right amount of time
and it will just grow itself it's like magic just appears
and that is way more like the unborn because here's the thing nothing is actually added to the unborn from the
time of their fertilization except for adequate nutrition in a proper environment which spoiler alert are the
exact same two things that you and i still need to keep growing to maturity i am not considered scientifically
mature i am 23 years old and so i still need adequate nutrition
in a proper environment in order to continue growing to what science would consider me to be mature
and so if you are an organism now you had to have been the exact same organism at fertilization because nothing
essential has been added to you that is the biological evidence in a nutshell you're going to use that almost
never let's go talk about the way more interesting thing the philosophical case
for the unborn in other words why is it that the unborn should be considered
persons not biological humans persons the kind of thing that has rights like you or i
there are a lot of different valid ways to argue for the personhood of the
unborn but we teach a particular way at equal rights institute because it has quite
honestly been more persuasive than any other pro-life argument my team at eri has ever seen
this is what we do for a living we literally go out to college campuses and we talk to purchase students constantly
and this argument was so effective that it kind of became a running joke like we developed it a few years ago we
used to use a different personhood argument and then we developed this one and then we went out and started testing it on college campuses and we would sit
down and debrief after our day of doing outreach and the first person would be like i had five people change their mind
about abortion today we're like oh my gosh what happened tell us more and be like i used the equal rights argument
and the next person be like no way i had four people change their mind today because i use the equal rights argument and down it went down the circle
we have never seen anything that changed so many protest minds as this particular argument so if you ask
that clarification question if somebody says something like no one knows when life begins or an embryo isn't alive and you clarify do you mean biology or
philosophy and they say philosophy i don't think the unborn is like a person like you or i
now is the time to make the equal rights argument i'm going to teach you how to do it in four steps
step one is to step away from abortion
that probably seems like a really weird thing to do in a conversation about abortion
but it's actually going to help you a lot because our goal is to show them that they think differently about
abortion than every other issue it's also going to help the conversation
if it's feeling a little bit tense because we're going to talk about something that they're probably extremely passionate about equality
and so it's really important that we ask their permission first because i don't want them to think i'm
dodging the question or something that like oh i've been defeated by their purchase argument so i'm going to go talk about something else no so i'll say
something like this can we put abortion on the shelf for a minute so i can understand how you think
about rights more generally we'll come back to abortion in a minute and then i'm gonna ask them if they
think that equality is important asking specifically about the right to
life or the right to protection from violence and there's a couple different ways you can do this i might say do you believe
in equal rights for all people do you think equality is important do you think people deserve an equal right
to life or my personal favorite do you think it's important for people to have equal protection from violence
that's the one i usually use feel free to pick whichever one it feels i guess most natural to you
they're going to say yes so you should take a minute to actually point out that you agree this is a
valuable place to build some common ground i will happily take a minute and talk about how i think there's a lot of
cases in history where we have not adequately protected people from violence because of some
arbitrary trait that they had like we deemed that females weren't people that should be protected or
people that are of different races weren't people who should be protected this is not a debate
there is no timer so we are not in a race for me to get out my pro-life argument as fast as
possible my goal is for this to be a conversation we're two friends standing by side by
side trying to find truth together and so that means that i'm not afraid to take a minute to point out my common
ground and talk about how we can agree that it's it's really important to protect people from violence
then step two i'm gonna sort who is in
and who is out in other words i'm gonna set up this idea of an equal right to
life club this is an idea like we're taking equal rights as a concept and trying to make
it tangible so we can imagine it so we're gonna have this equal right to life circle or club or community or
whatever the idea is that every entity inside of this club has an equal right to life or an equal
right to be protected from violence and all of the entities outside of this club do not now here's the key
this is an equal right to life club that does not mean that the entities outside of this club
have no rights it just means that they don't have the same rights as a thing inside of the club
everything inside is equal the things outside might have some level of rights but they're not the same as
the thing inside this will become easier as we start to actually sort because i've created this really obvious
question what is it that belongs inside of this club
and so i'll ask the pro choice person i'll literally establish this idea be like let's make this idea of rights tangible and i'm here to talk about the
equal right to life club okay so i'm going to ask them specifically about three different types of entities
the first one is human adults after all if we don't agree that all
human adults should be in the equal rights of life club i am going to feel a lot less emotionally safe right now
okay i want to be sure that we agree that all human adults regardless of their race or their gender or their
sexual orientation or their disability status or their whatever it is equally wrong to kill
any human adult i think we can all agree on that it should not be controversial all right so we got them all in the
equal right to life club now i ask a second question what about human newborns
genuine questions should human newborns be in the aquarium to life club i have never talked to a pro-choice person in
real life who actually thought that it was okay to kill newborns
there are some famous pro-choice philosophers that are willing to say that most pro-choice people
if they initially say yeah i think it's okay to kill newborns if i press them on that a little in the context of a
conversation and i'm not like being hostile to them they'll back off of that real fast
if you want to ask me more about that during q a you're more than welcome to i can go down that rabbit hole but 99
of virtuous people you talk to do not think it's okay to kill newborns if they're actually being honest with you about their view and they feel like
you're being honest back with them and they can have this genuine conversation so we know human adults are in the equal right to life club human newborns are in
the equal rights life club what about squirrels like serious question i'll say this to
the first person i'll be like this might be kind of a weird question but let's actually consider it for a second
what about squirrels should they be in the equal right to life club again i have never
talked to a pro-choice person in real life who thinks that squirrels should be in
the equal rights life club if they say they should be they always backtrack as soon as i do
this i'll say i totally agree with you that squirrels have some level of rights like
i definitely think we should not be like torturing scrolls for fun or something that would be gross just weird please
don't do that i think in my view squirrels belong in maybe this other
club like i don't think they're the same as human adults and human newborns i don't think they're in the equal right to life
club i feel like they're over here in the some rights club in the it's wrong to torture you for fun club
and as soon as i clarify that the purchase person is always like oh yeah no that's totally what i think i'm like
okay cool we're good squirrels are not in the equal right to life club they definitely have some level of rights and maybe protest person and i will disagree
on exactly how much right squirrels would have but they don't think of the exact same as human adults and human newborns again
happy to go further down that rabbit trail during q a if you want to talk about crazy people that actually think squirrels are the same as us but that's
very rare all right so we've sorted three things human adults are in human newborns are
in and squirrels are out that leaves us
with a really obvious question what is it that is granting certain
entities access into this equal right to life club while denying other entities
like there must be something in other words there must be some reason why some things are in the equal right
to life club and some things are out let's call the thing that gives you entry x what do you think it could be
i'll ask the pro-choice person what what do you think x is and they'll give me a variety of answers
there are two things that we already know about x we know it has to explain why human
adults are in and human newborns are in and squirrels are out we also know that it has to be a trait
that you either have or you don't have it cannot be something like us on a
spectrum it can't be like a dimmer light switch it has to be something you have or you don't have so example
it cannot be intelligence intelligence cannot explain why we have an equal right to life
because we're not all equally intelligent and if you don't believe me just go to youtube and start reading the comments under the first video you find
okay it's okay i am pro equal right to life for obnoxious people on the internet i'm just saying that
intelligence cannot explain why we have an equal right to life and so it has to be a trait you either have or
don't have otherwise you'd have different levels of a right to life based on like how intelligent you are okay
so i will ask the pro-choice person what they think that x is and they will provide me with a variety of answers and
every single pro-choice answer you get is going to have one of two problems as my friend trent horn says pro-choice
definitions of personhood either include too many things like squirrels or they
exclude too many things like newborns let me show you what i mean here's some very common pro-choice answers that i
get to what is x the ability to think and that by that i mean the ability to
have mental processes at all does that include human adults
yeah does that include human newborns yup does that exclude squirrels
no scrolls can have mental processes here's another one the ability to feel pain and we're going
to simplify that definition to just be physical pain that's caused by like disease injury or something that hurts
the body does that include human adults yes does that include human newborns yes
does that exclude squirrels no squirrels can feel pain as can most of
the animal kingdom now sometimes polish people like to bring up really rare cases of human adults that cannot feel
pain like gabby gingrich is a really famous example or other people that have hereditary sensory and autonomic
neuropathy type five say that five times fast it is a real condition that there are
some human adults that cannot feel pain but i haven't found that very helpful to bring up to pro-choice people because
they kind of think of gabby gingrich as being more of an exception to the rule as opposed to something that actually
disproves the rule so i found it way more helpful to point out that basically the whole animal kingdom can feel pain
than to point to just rare cases of human adults that cannot here's another one
self-awareness and by that i mean the ability to reflect on your own existence at all does that include human adults
yeah does that include human newborns no human newborns are not self-aware the
most basic form of self-awareness which is the ability to know your own body is like a physical object begins at about
four months old but if you're using that definition the one that philosophers use the ability to
reflect on your own existence that doesn't start until about 18 months old
remember how i said that there are a few rare cases of famous pro-choice philosophers who think it's okay to kill
newborns that's why because they think what makes you a person is this very advanced thing that
newborns cannot do and therefore the logical implication of their position is that it has to be okay
to kill newborns it's a pretty repugnant position to ninety-nine percent of fair choice people
so most perfect people do not actually agree with the extremes of their own side here's another one viability the
ability to survive outside of a uterus does that include human adults yes does that include human newborns literally
that is the definition of a newborn does that exclude squirrels no it would exclude squirrel fetuses
but that does not help us guys viability is not a plausible definition for what makes a person last one
sentience and by that i mean the minimal ability to perceive the world does that include human adults
yes does that include human newborns yes oftentimes people will jump to this
after they did self-awareness they realize that self-awareness doesn't include newborns so they back it up to
like a way more basic ability like just let's just say you perceive the world you don't have to know yourself but you
can just like vaguely perceive the world so they'll back up to this because newborns can do this
but squirrels are very sentient okay squirrels collect their nuts for the
winter usually all over a seven acre area which is berserk okay they are very
aware of the world it is craziness sentience cannot explain why you're a
person so if the protest person hasn't already asked you at this point we move on to our last step
which is to share your solution in other words this is what i think x is i think the
only thing that already that works with the things we already know from our sorting process
is that something like human nature is granting access it's the only thing
that everyone in this community shares equally and so to bring abortion back into it that's why i think embryos
should be protected from violence they have that same thing that the rest of us in the community
share and so i think they must be included i am not pro-life because i want to
control women's bodies or punish people from having sex or something i'm pro-life because i'm pro-equality
and i'm anti-violence and i think the only way to logically affirm equal rights
is to protect the unborn too now you might notice something in my
definition when i tell portraits people what i think it is i say something like human nature and probably people are
like what does that mean what do you mean by something like human nature first of all poetry's people never ask me that i know
that's mind-boggling to you the first time i learned this i was like what do you mean protest people don't ask what you mean by human nature they don't
because the concept of human nature just makes sense to people regardless of what religious or non-religious background
they come from regardless of what world view they come from they have this idea that like there is something valuable
about humans and so they can kind of define human nature however they want to in their
head and it makes sense they're like yeah the unborn are also human so i'm i'm tracking with this this makes sense
now if i'm talking to like a pro-choice philosophy professor at a university
i'm gonna have to go deeper than that and so i do want you to know that i do have a deeper answer and it's way longer
than i have time to get into right now and so this is my two second plug for our online training materials at
equal rights institute we have something called the equip for life course on the left which is what i'll talk about right now which is basically an online
training course to teach you all the way from square zero of like how do i just get approaches persons walls down so
they'll even talk to me all the way up to what are the smartest pro-choice philosophers in the world
saying and how do i respond to that and everything in between it's amazing that's the course i took my club through
and then we heard going out and having all those conversations with pro-choice people and so if you want to know what i
mean by something like human nature lesson 10 of the equip for life course is an hour and a half video on advanced
philosophy land of what is human nature super interesting if you never want to
watch that video you can just skip it but if you like philosophy that's the place to get that answer
really quick review if you're gonna make the equal rights argument a pro-choice person says a very
vague statement like no one knows when life begins the embryo isn't human you ask that clarification question i want
to make sure i understand you when you say it's not human did you mean it's not
biologically human like it's not a member of the species homo sapiens or do you mean something more philosophical
like an embryo is not a person that should have rights like you or i if they say they meant the more philosophical
thing you're gonna step away from abortion and talk about equality you're gonna set up this idea of an equal right
to life community and try to sort who is in and who is out focusing on
human adults human newborns and squirrels then you are going to solve for x you're
going to try to figure out what it is that is granting certain entities access into this club while denying others
and last but not least you're going to share your solution ensure that ultimately the reason that
you're pro-life is because you think that's the only logical way to be pro-equality is nothing to do with my
religion absolutely nothing i am able to make a nuanced and secular pro-life argument
that can be understood and applied to something that our generation is extremely passionate about
as we should be if you can go out and make arguments like this that are actually relevant
to our generation that fit them in the way that they think in the way that we ought to be thinking
that's how you can ultimately change campuses and how you can change minds thank you
[Applause] thank you so much emily that was amazing that's very insightful um so we now have
10 minutes for another q a with emily so once again you guys can just come up the
sides here if you have a question and hopefully we can get to all of them
oh sorry um uh my question is like you said um
that you were in your first year of university you're feeling you know terrified to come out as pro-life and to have those
conversations so i was just wondering if you can give encouragement to the young people here who are you know scared or
nervous to have those conversations like what is the best encouragement to build up the strength to have those conversations and come out as pro-life
yeah that's a great question so i know that i myself probably never would have had the guts to come out as
pro-life if i didn't have that one friend meredith who was standing by my
side and so find that person first of all you don't have to do this alone
and you're all here today you came here with somebody you know one other pro-life person i
guarantee it and so coming out with someone else as pro-life can be really really helpful
number two make sure that you are equipped with how to
explain your position and my organization can help with that there's a lot of other pro-life
organizations that can help with that help you feel confident to answer those basic questions of why is this what i
believe how do i respond to things like abortion in the case of rape like questions that come up all the time get
ready with those answers so that when you actually come out as being pro-life
you're not afraid of what people might say because you're like i am equipped i've practiced you can even practice
with a buddy so one of the things that i do at equal rights institute is i help to train college pro-life clubs
and we have this program called the affiliate group program that i will not go into right now but one of the things that i do with my students in that
program is after they've gone through our training materials we will like
practice dialoguing i will play pro choice on a zoom call i'm very good at playing pro choice i've talked to a lot
of pro-choice people i can do it really well and so we'll actually give them a chance to practice using the arguments do that
with your buddy like practice talking it through so that the very first time you
were trying to answer what do we do about abortion in the case of rape it's to your friend who you know is actually
pro-life not to the scary pro-choice person because a my my final point is that purchase
people actually aren't that scary i have never ever done an outreach with
a college pro-life group i go around to their campuses all the time i train college students and then i'll go out
and i'll have them set up that same table that i did on my own college campus and i will sit there with them
and we'll have conversations with the students on their campus i have never done that and we haven't gotten to the end of the
day and the students will say to me oh my gosh pro-choice people aren't as scary as i thought
you can do it if you are just nice what a concept
i promise you that they're going to do that in return if you start asking them questions show that you genuinely are trying to
understand where they're coming from they will follow suit so get a buddy get some practice
and know that it's gonna be okay fortress people are not that scary thanks for your question thank you so
much so she stole my question
do you have another question uh no but i would just like to say um i thank you very much because i have many
pro-choice friends and i just kind of find it always frustrating when i want to talk to them
and i don't really i really knew how to talk to them how to converse just just have a
intelligent conversation without really insulting each other and um now we can get to somewhere and
um i thank you for that thank you so much for your comment i really appreciate that i'm glad to know
that you found this helpful hi hello um i may be poking the bear
with this question but i'm kind of wondering in your experience have you ever found that there are people who um
maybe don't value life after birth and how do you respond to them and maybe
further than that have you ever met someone where you think like it's not even worth it to like not that someone
isn't worth trying to have that conversation but has it ever been too difficult that you don't think it's possible to maybe convert them or
convince them of another belief sure um so first question
yes i do talk to sometimes people that don't seem to really value life after birth and that's a whole different
conversation which basically to like start with the very basics there the first thing i try
to do is nail down where their line is because i've never talked to a like poetry
person who was like you should just be allowed to kill me right now like no problem
like they're not gonna say that obviously so what is it like where are they drawing their line
sometimes it's a certain level of cognitive ability so certain people with disabilities would be out you know not
being allowed to have rights or you have to be to a certain age sometimes it has to do with your usefulness to society and i'm talking to a utilitarian so my
very first step is to figure out where are they drawing their line and then depending on where that line is
i'm gonna have to attack it differently so that's a super broad question and so that just really involves getting to
know what are kind of the different kinds of world views that might result in that so i would suggest you know go
look up utilitarianism relativism disability ethics those are probably the three biggest ones i see that result in
someone not really valuing life after birth to go to your second question i have had precisely two conversations
and the thousands that i have these are two very memorable ones where i just had to end the conversation with them
and that's not because i think they're unreachable i think it's because they were unreachable in that moment
they were not in an emotional place where they could have a conversation right now this happened one of those two conversations was just about three
months ago i was on a college campus and this couple actually came up to me and
they were just screaming at me like i could see them coming from a mile away and i can take that for a little while
oftentimes people will come up really upset and that's okay i i get it you think that i'm trying to
take away your rights if i thought someone was trying to take away my rights i'd be pretty upset too so it's okay i will just let them talk
and usually what happens is after about five minutes of them just word vomiting at me
they realize that i'm listening and they're like hold up she hasn't tried yelling over me she's just like
sitting here with really relaxed body language taking it in and then they kind of pause for a second
because they're confused and then i jump in and i ask a clarification question which is really not what they're
expecting me to do because they think i'm going to launch into my pro-life monologue now that they took a breath
and so suddenly they start calming down i've seen that pattern happen hundreds and hundreds of times do not give up on
someone because they came up to you really mad but in this particular case with this couple i tried that and it didn't work
they just kept kept screaming and i gave them another five minutes and we kept going i was like these people really
worked up okay and we went for probably about 15 minutes and i could not get a word in edgewise i wasn't even trying to
make an argument just trying to like get them to calm down and show them that i was listening and at the end of about 15 minutes i was
like this is not a good use of my time in my head i'm like they're not in a place right now where we can actually
talk and so i ended the conversation and when i do that i said i say something like this this is what i did in that case i
said look i'm just here because i'm trying to have more productive political dialogues with people because i think
people really suck at talking about issues like this and i would love to be able to talk to
you and really understand where you're coming from but it doesn't really seem like that's what you're looking for right now
it feels like you just want to yell at me and that's not really productive and so if if you want to come back later
i'm going to be here all day and you're in a better place and maybe we can actually talk like please come back i'd
love to talk with you but right now i think i'm gonna go talk to some other people i
hope you have a nice day they did not shake my hand but i offered
and they stormed off i've had that happen precisely twice that one and there was one a couple years ago it does happen but it's very rare
so essentially if someone is like mostly morally good and not totally insane then
they're probably capable of having that conversation with you i believe that and i believe that couple is capable just
they weren't in that moment and there may be another time i hope with a future pro-life person where
they're alone more in a better place and they can have that conversation yeah
uh so i have a question well two clarifications and one question by
you know how you said it's not moral to kill adults right yeah uh by killing you mean murdering because
in war people do kill each other yes so that's a really good quest question i
don't usually just say that in my conversations with pro-choice people sort of reason they don't ask that question very often but i will clarify
that if they do ask that i think we're talking about killing that is not in self-defense like we all agree that killing and
self-defense is okay and just war like a concept of being in war
we can have a debate all day long about whether we've actually ever had a just war like we can argue about that
different people have different ideas that's fine we all agree in the concept of one like that could hypothetically be a case in war where it's okay to kill
people so yes we're talking about killing innocent human adults like it's not okay for me to just like kill you
right now obviously not so hope that clarifies uh another clarification um you know how
you're saying in debates that people uh they just usually call each other
names and you know yeah don't use logic that's also i think that's also mainly
because in debates p it's not in debates aren't arguments so you can't change people's minds anyway and the whole
point of debates is to make the other person look dumb and make yourself look educated yes
exactly so that is another reason that the dialogues i'm having are not debates
because a dialogue is where we are two people standing side by side trying to find truth together
and a debate is where you're trying to make the other person look dumb and you're trying to win over an audience and if that is your attitude
going into a conversation please don't have that conversation
because you're not going to do any good by it that was a very good point thank you for bringing that up
um one last thing so can you argue with people who don't seem
to want to listen to reason and if so is there a way that you could do that good question um
i think most people are willing to listen to reason if they're in a comfortable safe place
in the conversation in other words people are not open to changing their mind when they're feeling like
emotionally unsafe i'm not talking about like crazy kinds of emotional safety
that some people our age try to justify but if they're feeling threatened by you
they're feeling intimidated by you they're not gonna be willing to listen to reason if they feel like you guys are friends
you've built some rapport with them you've asked clarification questions you've shut up long enough for them to
talk so that you actually show in your body language i'm i'm really trying to understand you
i'm taking a lot of time to clarify that i understand you then their wall starts
to come down and they start to feel emotionally safe and they're more open to hearing what you have to say
i don't think i've ever talked to a pro-choice person in real life i've talked to him on social media for sure
but people don't feel emotionally safe on social media people on social media are willing to listen to reason because they're trying to protect their
image and if they show that they're starting to think differently about something that ruins their whole image to their
followers but if i'm talking to just you like i'm actually talking to you
and we've become friends you're willing to just calm down
and not be so scared about what other people are going to think about you in that moment and they're willing to listen to reason i think the primary
reason people aren't is just because of the state that they're in in the conversation which is why your very first goal has to be to get their wall
down so they're going to be in an open place to listen to reason and if they're not in an open place because they're
screaming at you like my question over here then maybe now isn't the best time for that conversation for them
and maybe we can come back to it later i hope that answers your question yeah thank you i'm really sorry but we'll
have to stop q a right now um just so that we don't go too like far behind on schedule
can i so yeah the people who have questions um emily will be at the candlelight vigil later tonight and she is available by
email um social media very happy to to take questions then
sorry i have to keep things moving i also have a table downstairs you can come visit me um yes uh so can i get a
final round of applause for emily then

 

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