(Image by 1388843 from Pixabay)

When I tell people I’m involved in any kind of public pro-life work, one response I sometimes get from other pro-lifers is a kind of wary admiration. The tone of voice lowers, the head ducks a bit. “It’s great you’re doing that, it’s so important” followed (sometimes out loud and sometimes implicitly) by “I’d be terrified to say anything about that to my friends / in my workplace / in my college.”

Fear is one of the great obstacles to making the case for universal human dignity. Those most afraid of saying anything about abortion are often among the people who would be best at doing so. So what to do about it? What if you’re afraid?

Unfortunately, there isn’t any one answer. The virtue of courage is about responding the right way when faced with fear. But what the right way is depends on the situation. The same is true about the method one uses to overcome fear: different ones work for different people. These are some suggestions that I and others I know have found helpful.

  • Write down what you’re actually afraid of

Pro-life fear is often nebulous. There’s a sense that something bad would happen if you were to talk about your position on abortion, but it’s not always clear what exactly the bad thing is. It’s worth being explicit with yourself. Write down all the bad things that could happen if you talked about abortion to such-and-such a person. Then give them a score based on how likely they are to happen, how afraid you’d be of them happening, and how bad you actually think they objectively would be if they did happen. This could be out of ten, or it could just be something like “not that bad / quite bad / very bad / awful”. Think about them, turn them over in your head for a bit, try to imagine how things might go and how you’d actually feel about those possibilities were they to arise.

Are you afraid of being fired? Are you afraid that you might hurt future career prospects? Are you afraid that you’ll be socially shunned? Are you afraid that someone might say something a bit sharp to you? Are you afraid someone might make fun of you? Are you afraid that someone might just think worse of you? Make it specific.
Leah Libresco writes about a useful term for our tendency to avoiding thinking about things that make us uncomfortable:

Colloquially at CFAR, we like to say that the thoughts that we flinch away from are surrounded by Ugh Fields. Get too close to a painful thought, and you’ll be in distress and have a strong disincentive for coming back to the idea or trying to resolve it.

An interesting thing about Ugh Fields is that they often, though not always, make the thought within them scarier than it would be if it was honestly and closely examined. Fear of the unknown isn’t worse than fear of something concrete every time. But it is a lot of the time. You may be surprised at how much less afraid you become when you dispel the field and put the fear into the light. You might still decide that some risks aren’t worth taking. But you might find that more come out worth it than you’d expected.

  • Take the easier opportunities

It’s obvious to say, but not every conversation about abortion is as difficult as every other one. Mentioning offhand to your easygoing, apolitical co-worker that you’re pro-life is not as hard as getting into a serious discussion about the rights of the unborn with your highly strung and dedicatedly pro-choice manager.

While we’re writing things down, another good thing to do is write down a bunch of people you could potentially strike up a conversation with. Pick the absolute easiest and try to talk to that person. You don’t have to go straight into the lion’s den. You don’t have to go there at all! One thing I often say is that if every shy or scared pro-lifer was 33% more willing to talk about this issue, it would transform the politics of abortion across the world. You don’t have to change anyone’s mind on the spot or be the world’s greatest pro-life advocate: look into the different types of abortion conversation (Three kinds of abortion conversation, and how not to mix them up) and aim to have a low-commitment one. Often just saying you’re pro-life is helpful (again, check out this post for tips on how to do that). You may not feel brave enough to have every conversation you could about abortion (few of us are) but everyone is brave enough to have the *easiest* conversation about abortion they can think of. The key is to avoid doing nothing.

  • Get equipped

Things are almost always less scary when you’ve prepared for them. That’s where we come in! Check out our blogs giving an overview of the basics of the debate: here are three good ones to start you off.

Why the abortion debate is really two debates (and why that’s confusing)

Pro-life 101: an Equal Rights Argument

Does the right to bodily autonomy override the right to life?

That will get you started on the ‘what’ of the discussion. If you want to know more about the ‘how’, check out our Having better conversations category: Muireann’s How I changed my pro-life elevator pitch is a favourite of mine. Reading it immediately changed my approach to conversations and made me feel better able to go into them without quailing.

The point isn’t to be Perfectly Ready for Every Situation That Could Arise. That’s never going to be possible. The point is to have enough knowledge about what helps make genuine and respectful dialogue possible to make the prospect of having a conversation about abortion less scary.

Again, this can be done. Just the other day I had a great conversation with two friends and academic colleagues who I’d never seriously talked about the issue with before. One of them already knew I was pro-life and the other didn’t. I gave my elevator pitch (connecting my position on abortion to my support for disability rights) and we went through a bit of the equal rights argument and talked about some of the recent hard cases that arose in the US after Roe VS Wade was overturned. At a certain point in the conversation one of my friends said she’d have to do more thinking about what it was that made an early embryo or foetus a ‘pre-person’ when a newborn was a ‘full person’ and I was happy to leave it there, going on to chat about some related issues and about the importance of academic freedom. The whole thing was respectful and decent, and everyone involved came out of it thinking better of each other, not worse. 

Again, I can’t promise every conversation will be like that. But more of them will be than I think most scared pro-lifers realise. Take courage, my friends!

Ben