You’re chatting with a group of friends or coworkers around the water cooler, over lunch, or in line to pick up the kids from school. The conversation meanders through politics and social issues, when suddenly the topic of abortion comes up. It only takes a moment for everyone to realize that you’re a pro-lifer. Your friends begin peppering you with questions and objections, some of which you’ve heard before, some of which you haven’t:
“How can you equate an embryo to a baby, if it has no higher brain function?”
“What about pregnancies resulting from rape or incest?”
“I’m personally against abortion, but I wouldn’t tell others what to do.”
“Shouldn’t it be a choice between a woman and her doctor?”
“Who are you to impose your morality on everyone else?”
What would you say to answer these questions and show your friends why abortion is wrong, in less than five minutes?
Now wait — before you answer, let’s make things more interesting: imagine that instead of you facing these questions, it’s your college-age son or daughter, and imagine that instead of a group of friends, they’re staring down a pro-abortion professor in front of a classroom of their peers. Would they be up to the challenge?
Believe it or not, it isn’t as daunting as it sounds. There’s a powerful and practical new resource designed to prepare college-bound students for this moment, and others like it.
Renowned pro-life apologists and authors John Ensor and Scott Klusendorf have teamed up to write what I think could be the coup de grâce for abortion among millennials. It’s called Stand for Life: A Student’s Guide for Making the Case and Saving Lives, and it’s packed with tools to cut through the relativist and utilitarian mythology that prop up the pro-abortion argument. It’s full of simple, powerful and usable answers to some of the toughest questions friends or professors will throw at your son or daughter.
For example, how do you answer someone who argues that fetuses in the first trimester clearly aren’t human yet, and are therefore okay to abort? Simple! You start with the only four features which make any fetus different than you or me: size, level of development, environment, and degree of dependency. As Ensor and Klusendorf show, none of these differences are morally relevant to the question of a fetus’ humanity.
Okay, what if someone tells you that abortion is a personal choice, and that women have a right not to have other people’s morality imposed on their private decisions? Well, you “trot out the toddler” as the book says. No one would ever make the same argument in favor of killing toddlers. By showing the inconsistency, you can demonstrate that while personal choice is important, no one has the right to choose to take innocent human life.
And that, according to Ensor and Klusendorf, is how pro-lifers can win not just debates, but minds — by focusing with laser beam intensity on the only question that really matters: What is the unborn? Science, of course, overwhelmingly answers this question for us. The unborn child is a human being.
This handbook is not only designed to convince students to believe in the dignity of unborn life, but also how to persuade others, with grace and winsomeness. And if you tune in to "BreakPoint this Week" this weekend, you can hear Scott and John flesh out these arguments even more.
Students are one of the most at-risk groups for abortion. Knowing how to make the case on campus could make the difference between life and death for a child you’ll never meet.
Come to BreakPoint.org, click on this commentary to get your copy of Stand for Life and to listen to my interview with the authors on "BreakPoint this Week." Read the book, pass it to a student, and pray this generation will be the last to know legalized abortion in America.
John Stonestreet, the host of The Point, a daily national radio program, provides thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN), and is the co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.
BreakPoint commentary airs each weekday on more than one thousand outlets with an estimated listening audience of one million people. BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends via radio, interactive media, and print.
Publication date: February 22, 2013