(Image by Karolina Grabowska from Pixabay)

At the Minimise Project we’re all about helping people have better conversations about abortion. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could do that… by actually talking with you?

Turns out, we can! For a while now we’ve been running live Conversations Workshops (with capital letters because they’re so great) in person and sometimes over Zoom. These workshops are designed to equip you with the tools and arguments you need to have productive, persuasive conversations about abortion, that really change people’s minds on the topic. If you’re interested in having us run one for you (for the low low price of free), there’s a link at the bottom of the post.

We’ve done workshops for university groups, including Students for Life groups at UCD, Oxford, the University of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame. We’ve also done general audience workshops based in Dublin a couple of times, as well as running zoom workshops for Students for Life Ireland and the Pro Life Campaign. 

The workshops have been incredibly well-received, with very positive feedback from our attendees:


“This was the best pro-life workshop I ever attended”

“I was very impressed with how the workshop was so intelligent and also practical”

“Overall it was an excellent day. You guys were very knowledgeable, eloquent, and so well-prepared – the booklet alone is brilliant”

“I really think you’ve hit the nail on the head – 1-2-1 conversations are the key. Many thanks!!”

“Highly recommend this workshop to give simple, practical, valuable tips to open up and engage in meaningful, non-threatening, effective pro-life conversations in everyday life. Thank you!”

Our workshops are normally four hours long (with a break!) and are divided into what we call the what and the how. We can also run a workshop over the course of two two-hour events. In the first part, we talk a lot about what to say to make a convincing case for the pro-life position. We think pro-life people often misunderstand pro-choice people, and that the two groups have a lot more in common than many people think. What’s more, approaching the debate in the way that’s most likely to have pro-choice people listen to you is (we think) the best way to approach it on the merits. So in the workshop we talk about how the abortion debate is really two debates: one over personhood and one over bodily rights. We share the way that we approach each of these. For the first one, we explain the Equal Rights argument, which relies only on the assumption that all born humans have equal rights and works from there to the personhood of the unborn. For the second, we argue that bodily autonomy is a critically important value that pro-lifers should take more seriously, but that consideration of cases like that of conjoined twins suggest that it shouldn’t outweigh the unborn’s right to life.

The second half of the workshop focuses on how to make a conversation persuasive and productive. Human beings are not purely logical input-output machines – we are shaped by our psychology and by the environment we find ourselves in. In order for a conversation on a topic as fraught and complicated as abortion to be genuine and persuasive, we have to account for these psychological realities in how we engage with people. We will give you hints and tips on how to do so in an effective manner. We will also explain why conversations matter in the first place – why they are a really important part of pro-life advocacy, which in our view does not get the attention it deserves. Finally we explain the types of conversations you can have. How do you start a conversation in the first place? What do you do if you don’t know the person very well? What do you do if you’re vastly outnumbered by pro-choice people? How do you proceed if you seem to be talking to someone who really seems to want to go deeper, versus someone who doesn’t seem to want to scratch the surface?

Over the course of the whole workshop, you will learn:

*Why personal conversations about abortion matter

*The basics of pro-life apologetics

*Personhood and equal rights arguments

*Bodily autonomy arguments

*The psychology of conversations

*The different types of conversations you can have

*How to avail of opportunities to initiate conversations

*How to be persuasive without putting people under pressure

If you would like to be notified of when our next workshop will be held, please register your interest at this link. (If you would like to join our general mailing list as well or instead, you can do so here.) If you have a network of pro-life friends who would be interested in the workshop, we are happy to run one for you and can travel within Ireland to do so. Please email us at theminimiseproject@gmail.com if you would like to arrange one!

Ben and Muireann