Why are you pro-life? Tell your stories.
[This article is a transcript of “Why are you pro-life? Tell your stories.” courtesy of volunteer Ben Tomlin. If you’re interested in volunteering to transcribe more of our content, please complete our volunteer survey.]
This video is also available on TikTok.
When people ask you why you’re pro-life, yes, you can say things like, “Because every human life has value,” or “Because biology tells us that human beings begin at conception,” or something like that, and I’m not saying that’s unimportant, and I’m not saying it’s untrue, but I think a lot of times when people ask you why you’re pro-life, they really want to know: Why are you pro-life? Why did you decide that this issue was important enough to you that you were going to get in a fight about it, get in an argument about it, do something about it? Why that?
There’s going to usually be some kind of reason in addition to the biological facts or the sound philosophical arguments or the relevant statistics. Those are all important too. Those are tools we want to keep in our toolbox, but usually there’s something else. It can have to do with pregnancy loss, it can have to do with their own experiences with abortion or with people they know who went through it, so when people ask you why you’re against abortion, tell them your stories.
Pro-choice people often assume that pro-life people are pro-life because we lack experience, because we have sort of a sunny, Pollyanna view of the world where everything is simple and pregnancies are always healthy and safe and they’re always wanted and everybody can just go on their merry way. They think that we don’t understand how hard life can be, how complicated situations can be. Otherwise, we would never hold this position.
Often it’s the opposite. We go through something really difficult, and it brings us to realizing that we want to defend the value of our own lives, the value of our children’s lives, the value of your children’s lives, and it’s not something we feel that we can let go of. It would be great if we could let it go. It would be great if we could take what is, generally speaking, the vastly more popular position that requires nothing of you. It requires you to just stay out of everyone’s business and do nothing. There are many times when many pro-life activists have thought, “It would be great if I was pro-choice. My life would be much less upsetting and much easier,” but we can’t because of what we’ve come to understand, because of what we know.
And those are the stories you need to be telling people, not because it’ll necessarily make them pro-life, but because they need to understand that pro-choice is not the default of all well-intentioned people who’ve gone through a lot. It’s not the default.
And just as pro-choice people, hopefully, are holding their position because of profound experiences they’ve gone through and knowledge that they have, because of good intentions of wanting to protect people and take care of people the best way they know how, which I think is most pro-choice people, so are we.
Learn how to share your story with our free, self-paced Storytelling Symposium:
If you appreciate our work and would like to help, one of the most effective ways to do so is to become a monthly donor. You can also give a one-time donation here or volunteer with us here.
