This is the third post in a series entitled “Talk About It.” This series will focus on how to spread the pro-life message through your personal relationships. Sign-up HERE to get articles like this delivered to your inbox.

The last post in this series asked the question: “When you go into a conversation about abortion what are your goals?”

Thanks to everyone who posted your goals!

Your Goals

There ended up being 36 goals posted by people like you on the last article. Overall, these were very good. Thanks for your input!

I’d love to go through each of them, but I can’t really do all of your responses justice.  However, most of the responses fell into three categories.

1 – Quick Understanding – Give them all the truth, science, logic, philosophy now and hope they change their minds.
2 – Gradual Understanding – Through either listening or smaller goals bring people to acceptance of the truth, science, logic… over many conversations.
3 – Seeds of Understanding – This is similar to the other two, but it is more of a reliance on planting a seed of truth and hoping that it grows at a later date.

These are all good goals. They are all very similar to each other in that they seek to increase understanding of the issue in a different way.

These are not my goals.

You see, my main goal does not focus directly on increasing understanding.

Understanding the Truth

Understanding the truth about abortion is an important element in becoming pro-life. This truth is really very simple, rational and straight forward. However, if you have ever had a conversation about abortion then you probably identify with this quote:

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.” – Sir Winston Churchill

Depending on how your conversations went, this quote may make you laugh or cry! Either way, I’m sure you recognize the fact that many people seem to be immune to rational understanding of abortion.

If that is truly the case, which it certainly has been in my experience, then why do we focus almost entirely on rational understanding as our end for an abortion conversation?

But isn’t this what we normally do? Logic, logic, logic!

Science seems to back up my experience. Looking at psychology and even neuroscience, it appears that we (humans in general) tend to be much less rational than we think we are.

It turns out that most people make many decisions first through emotion and then they justify it with their reason (rationalize). They usually do this without even realizing it.

This is very important to know when talking with someone about abortion.

My Goal

So, given the above discussion, what are my goals?

If people tend to make decisions emotionally and then rationalize them, then it is important to find what emotions are keeping them from being open to the truth. Otherwise, the truth falls on deaf ears no matter how good your arguments are.

Therefore, my main goal is to determine the emotional roadblocks that the other person has through calmly asking questions.

It may shock you, but this has very little to do with the truth about abortion or educating people on the facts. (that comes later) It’s important to be able to determine what emotions guide someone in being pro-choice before you start throwing facts, stats or clever arguments at them.

Don’t get me wrong, the truth is very important. You need to know your stuff. It’s just that emotional roadblocks must first be removed before someone is open to the truth.

I find that these roadblocks tend to come in a few general categories. I will talk about these categories and how to address them in the next post.

Your thoughts?

For now, what are some emotional roadblocks that you have encountered in your conversations about abortion? Please leave a comment below!

This post is from a series entitled “Talk About It.” This series is about how to spread the pro-life message through your personal relationships. 

Sign-up HERE to get articles in this series delivered to your inbox.