A discussion about abortion can easily devolve into a bitter shouting match, which won’t change anyone’s heart. Here are some tips from pro-life speaker Stephanie Gray Connors about how to keep your cool.
Transcript:
Caller: I got into one of those debates where it was supposed to be a casual friendly debate and it wasn’t. It was an abortion one, and then my fiancé, after the argument, told me, “Hey, you sounded a little bit emotional there.” And because this is something I want to go into as a public ministry, how do you overcome getting worked up?
Stephanie Gray Connors: A few things I would suggest: first of all, as often as we can remember, to keep inserting prayers in the silence of our hearts in our conversation, to ask God to give us the right disposition, that’s going to help. So to say things like “Come, Holy Spirit,” “Lord that I may see how to best love this person, how to best listen to this person.” Just short little prayers as you’re waiting for them to finish a point that they’re making.
The second thing is to not take things personally. So, yes, there’s there’s an understandable righteous anger we ought to have about abortion because it is ending the life of an innocent child who cannot defend his or herself, so we ought to have—there’s a righteous anger. We want to remember: at the end of the day we want to protect those children, and to protect those children we need to convince other people to protect those children, and we’re more likely to convince other people when we are gentle and when we are kind in our interactions with them. So we want to get to that goal, which then means we have to restrain ourselves at times and kind of pull back from exposing that righteous anger that we have.
The third thing I would suggest is to draw out of them what is behind the claims they’re making. So not just deal with them on an intellectual level, but try to deal with them on an emotional level; not from your perspective where you’re getting emotional and angry, but rather from their perspective to ask a question like “I’m curious, where does your passion come from?” Or to ask a question like “How old were you when you first learned about abortion and what did you think then?” And “Okay, now I understand what you think now, so it sounds like your position changed. When did it change and why did it change?”
And those types of questions are helpful because what it can draw out is potentially a personal experience that person has which is making them make irrational claims. Even if they seem level-headed and you seem more impassioned, they still may be illogical in the claims they’re making. And that could be grounded in the fact that they drove a friend to a clinic, or their mom had an abortion, or they themselves had an abortion; and we’re not going to find that out by directly asking, but if we ask where their passion came from or if they know anyone who had an abortion, that could cause them to share which could then cause us to develop empathy for them—not changing our position, but changing our disposition because of what we’ve learned.