I got a wonderful email from Andres in Santa Barbara who was in a dialogue about abortion and used an analogy about being hooked up to a machine in order to demonstrate that your personhood isn't based on your dependance. But the person he was talking to retorted, "Are you comparing a woman to a machine?!" Andres wants to know what I would suggest we do to avoid throwing people off when the analogies we use seem, at a surface level, to demean pregnant women.

In the video, I offer six tips for making clear analogies and responding to people who continue to misinterpret them.

1: Make sure you're communicating clearly.

2: Narrate the debate.

3: Suggest a golden rule for dialogue.

4: Explain that analogies are just that...analogies!

5: Explain that pro-choice people would be wise to not throw out all analogies.

6: Determine the right time to politely end the conversation.

Find more resources about bodily rights argument for abortion at:

http://prolifepodcast.net/tag/bodily-rights

Casey Vroman from Students for Life of America joins us in studio to talk about the free resources that SFLA offers to college students and now high schoolers. We believe it's important that all pro-life advocates know about these resources so that you can point students in your sphere of influence to them.

Questions:

1:55 How did you get involved with Students for Life and the pro-life movement?

3:15 How would you explain what Students for Life does to somebody who hasn't heard of SFLA before?

4:22 What is SFLA's long-term goal with campus clubs?

5:35 What is SFLA doing with high school students now?

6:46 What has it been like working with high school students?

8:18 Is SFLA planning on working with junior high students in the future, and what would you say to concerned parents about that?

10:29 What are some of the initiatives you're doing on college campuses now?

13:23 What practical resources is SFLA offering to college students?

16:14 What are some common mistakes students can avoid when starting a campus club?

19:50 Should clubs embrace a "whole life" model where they're also talking about capital punishment, sex trafficking and adoption, or should they focus on talking about abortion?

23:35 Talk to us about the Wilberforce and Steven's Fellowships.

25:20 What would be your key piece of advice for a high school student who wants a career in the pro-life movement?

Related Links:

- Visit Students for Life's website: http://StudentsForLife.org.

- Read Scott Klusendorf's "reading list for smart pro-lifers" that Josh referenced: http://bit.ly/17RnCNS

- Visit Students for Life's career opportunities page Josh referenced: http://StudentsForLife.org/Internships

Here's an outline of my main points in response to this question from Bobby: "Some pro-life people oppose 'incrementalist' pro-life laws because they always end with '... and then you can kill the baby.' What are your thoughts?

Note: Many of my arguments and thinking on these issues comes from conversations I had with Scott Klusendorf and Dr. Francis Beckwith, who both graciously spent time with me while I was working through these issues in 2007. I'm not sure now who said what and how many of these arguments are really my own, nor would I want to source any of these arguments directly to Scott or Frank without their permission. (These were all private conversations.) It's probably a fair assumption that the really smart talking points came from one of them though.

This was supposed to be a video but we had technical difficulties with the recorded video, so I'm posting the audio only.

Common ground: I agree that we don't want to communicate to people that we only care about babies that feel pain, are a certain age, not conceived in rape, etc.

I disagree that most forms of incremental legislation send that message. I think most people know how politics works.

It's one thing to endorse something, it's another thing to say what is allowed under the law. I offer a clear example of this from Gonzales vs. Carhart.

My argument is not that we should do evil that good may come. My argument is that when we pass incremental bills that will have a positive impact for the unborn, we are not actually doing evil. We are doing a good thing.

What's implicit in these bills is that we want to save all, but we know we can't, so we're going to save the most we can, and go from there. That's called graduated absolutism.

Why I'm not utilitarian: I'm not saying 'We'll kill one baby if you let another go.' It's more like if in a Japanese POW camp, the Japanese soldier tells a prisoner, 'We'll let you go, and you can either take two with you and we'll kill the other eight, or you can go alone and we'll kill all ten.' It seems like some pro-life people that support personhood amendments would say that by taking the two I'm implicitly saying you can kill the other eight. 'As long as you give me these two, THEN you can kill the POW's.' No, we value life, and we're trying to save as much as we can.

The Bible doesn't say that if you can't save all, you can't save any. The midwives in Exodus 1 weren't able to save all the babies, but they saved as many as they could, and they are praised for it. When the Pharaoh confronted them, they didn't make a pro-life argument or statement; they lied about it so that they could continue saving some! It could be argued that they were implicitly telling the leader of the land that it's okay to kill infants. They never to his face say 'You shouldn't do that.' They lied, and saved as many as they could.

William Wilberforce helped pass a bill, the Foreign Slave Trade Bill of 1806) that you could have ended with, 'and then you can sell the slave.'

Do you think it's more important to make an impact or to make a statement? I don't believe that passing a bill with a rape exception tacked onto it at the last minute sends a message to pro-choice people that we don't care about the babies conceived in rape that are sometimes killed in abortions.

Are there some pro-life bills that don't directly save many lives after they pass? Yes. (Parental notification with judicial bypass; the partial-birth abortion ban.) Yet both had educational value, especially the PBA ban.

After summarizing Abby Johnson's story, Josh asks 40 Days for Life co-founder Shawn Carney about his ministry as well as the state of the pro-life movement.

Questions:

1. How do you think 40 Days for Life has changed the pro-life movement?
2. Knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently when starting 40 Days for Life?
3. Do people often go from participating in 40 Days for Life to doing other pro-life activities? What are you doing to encourage that?
4. What do you think are the best methods for a local 40 Days for Life campaign?
5. What could RLCC do better to persuade people to participate in sidewalk counseling?
6. What has been the pro-life movements greatest victory so far?
7. What has been the pro-life movements greatest weakness?
8. What single thing should pro-lifers be doing that most are not doing right now?
9. How should pro-life people interact with those that are pro-abortion-choice?

Josh, Tim and Gabi discuss what it actually means to be open-minded, (it does NOT mean being wishy-washy,) and whether pro-life people should be open-minded too.

After wrapping up four Life Report episodes, Josh, Tim and Gabi hung out to cover some material they didn't have time to get into earlier in the day. Those topics and questions for Tim include:

1. You said, "Love does not insist on its own way; it does not need to have the last word in a debate." Does that conflict with the Stand to Reason mantra of trying to leave people with a pebble in their shoe?
2. A discussion of pro-life memes and why most of them are bad.
3. You said, "Love is not resentful, it does not dwell on the failures of those around us. Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing. It is not excited when those around us are caught in sin." What about pro-life groups like Live Action that do undercover investigative videos catching Planned Parenthood doing bad things?
4. Can you talk about how we are to love practically with those in the pro-life movement who may disagree on our political method, for example on our use of graphic images? How would you apply your piece to that?
5. Which line in the 1 Cor 13 piece do you feel is the most important, or the most contrasted by the way a lot of pro-life people actually act?

Megan Almon from Life Training Institute joins Josh and Gabi to discuss how pro-lifers can have productive conversations about Gosnell, as well as the common mistakes pro-lifers should avoid.

One of the most common questions we get is "how do you start non-weird conversations about abortion when you're not on campus next to a pro-life exhibit?" One of the easier methods is to use a story that's currently in the news. Josh thinks pro-life people can have good conversations about abortion starting with the controversy of what Gosnell did, but he doesn't think you should stop there. He uses several specific questions to lead the conversation into talking about the abortions that are less controversial to pro-choice people: abortions done on first-trimester babies that are in the womb, aren't viable, aren't conscious and don't feel pain.

After giving these questions and dialogue tips, the discussion turns to what pro-life people should NOT do when talking about Gosnell. What are the most common mistakes pro-lifers make regarding this story? Listen to the episode to find out.

Josh also briefly responds to the pro-choice argument that it's pro-lifers fault that women went to Gosnell's clinic in the first place.

Note from Josh: We shot this episode a week before Gosnell was finally convicted of murder, among other things. This content is still relevant, it just means you might change the first question from "Should Dr. Gosnell be in jail," to something like "do you think it's a good thing that Dr. Gosnell is serving a life sentence in prison?"

Last February we published two episodes with our favorite (nearly graduated) student from Notre Dame Law John Gerardi with an update on the HHS mandate lawsuits as well as answering the controversial question, "why did so many church-going Catholics vote for President Obama, again?!"  After we recorded those two episodes, we spent another 20 minutes answering questions we hadn't talked about yet, and answered a good questions sent from a listener. This is the audio from that post-episode discussion.

Topics/Questions:

1. "Tell me about states like Massachusetts, that are heavily Catholic and Irish but are totally in the tank for Obama."
2. "What do you think is the future for the bishops' involvement in politics?"
3. Karen: "Is it even possible that we really change our society legislatively, or do we need to concentrate on the hearts of women and men?"

Note from Josh: We try to get bonus audio published a lot closer to the original recording, but it wasn't as high of a priority as keeping our publishing schedule for TV and radio. As you listen to this, it'll be obvious that this was recorded before Pope Benedict stepped down.

Also, John said in this discussion that we're only "one Supreme Court justice away from overturning Roe vs. Wade." Based on some recent research that I plan on blogging about in the future, I now think this may be a bit optimistic. In other words, I think it's more likely that we have one or two justices that would overturn Roe, and a few others that we really don't know how they would rule on overturning Roe, even if they have pro-life beliefs. I hope history proves me wrong.

Josh, Tim and Gabi respond to fair questions that pro-choice people ask that we think pro-life people should be willing to answer.

In this episode, we discuss how a lot of pro-choice people believe that pro-lifers want to punish women for having premarital sex by forcing them to remain pregnant. This seems clear because we're not distributing condoms or encouraging the use of birth control, which could arguably lower the rate of unintended pregnancies and abortions. How should pro-lifers respond to this concern?

We also discuss the common conception (no pun intended) that pro-life activists are doing what they do because they're Christians. If so, is this just a ploy to force religion on people or win converts?

We end the episode by discussing a recent story of a teen who sued her parents who were trying to coerce her into having an abortion. We offer some tips for pro-life people to use this story in dialogues with their pro-choice friends.

Josh, Tim and Gabi spend the next two episodes responding to fair questions that pro-choice people ask that we think pro-life people should be willing to answer.

For example, when pro-lifers "trot out a toddler," does that mean we think women that have abortions are just as evil as mothers who kill their toddler?

They also discuss how pro-choice people are often confused when they see a picture of a six-day old embryo at implantation, and then see us point at that picture and call it a "person."