Amplify your voice: register for the Storytelling Symposium
I’m delighted to announce that Secular Pro-Life is partnering with Abortion Survivors Network and the Leadership Institute to create the Storytelling Symposium: a 6-part webinar series (plus a January 22 in-person workshop) to teach pro-lifers how to equip, empower, and support our storytellers. You can register here.
Why do we need the Storytelling Symposium?
Abortion advocates have done an amazing job harnessing the power of storytelling (Shout Your Abortion, WeTestify). Their efforts, combined with media eager to highlight pro-choice voices, have left a very one-sided impression in the public’s imagination.
But there are two sides to this debate.
Some people mistakenly believe pro-lifers oppose abortion because we lack experience. They think we’re being reductive about ethically complex situations because we’ve led lives of privilege, and if we realized how hard and complicated life can get, we wouldn’t be so unrelenting in our opposition to abortion.
But the reality is that many of us have come into anti-abortion work precisely because of our difficult and life-changing experiences.
There are women harmed by their abortions, and women happy they weren’t able to abort. There are people grateful they themselves weren’t aborted, and people grieving their aborted family members. There are physicians who regret that they used to perform abortions. There are people impacted by types of abortions most of the public finds abhorrent (later abortion, disability- or sex-selective abortion, selective reduction, coerced abortion).
There are countless reasons people move from pro-choice to pro-life, or from latently pro-life to actively pro-life. Everyone has a story. We want to equip pro-lifers to articulate these stories in relatable and powerful ways.
So is the Symposium exclusively for storytellers?
No!
Storytelling as activism is a team effort, including storytellers who are comfortable sharing these parts of their lives and activists and organizations ready to support them–before, during, and after their stories have been told. This work entails people sharing some of the most vulnerable and controversial parts of their lives. It can be socially isolating and emotionally exhausting. It can involve reliving traumatic memories, and it can put storytellers in some glaring spotlights. We want to prepare and take care of our storytellers.
The Symposium will have training for people to tell their stories and also for those who want to identify, prepare, and protect storytellers. There will also be training focused on how to prepare third parties (such as journalists, politicians, and other public speakers) to tell other people’s stories in honest and honorable ways.
What is the schedule for the Storytelling Symposium?
The Symposium will include five 90-minute Zoom sessions on Tuesdays at 8pm EST in January and February, as well as a single full day hybrid workshop (in-person and online) in Arlington, Virginia on January 22 (timed to coincide with the March For Life).
- January 7: Why do we need storytelling? Melissa Ohden
- January 14: How do we identify storytellers? Emily Massey-Logan
- (In person, Arlington, VA) January 22: Writing and Presenting Your Story, Dr. Heid Petak
- February 4: Storytelling for Policy Change, Dena Espenscheid
- February 11: How do you know when you’re ready to tell your story? Abortion Survivors Network staff
- February 18: What to expect if your story goes viral (or doesn’t) Monica Snyder
Register now to receive links for all the sessions and to have the option to attend the full day in-person workshop.
And if you can’t attend but would like to support SPL in these efforts, donate here.
