Whose Body, Whose Choice?

Handling a difficult conversation

Abortion is back in the news with the Dobbs case in front of the Supreme Court. It has never really not been in the news in my lifetime.

It would be good to see Roe vs. Wade overturned. However, what we hope for is a change of heart on the part of the public and that is not going to be accomplished by the lawyers. It will come from personal experiences and personal conversations. Those conversations are going to come from us.

As you know, abortion conversations tend to get pretty heated thanks to compassion for both the mother and the baby. They develop into discussions of principle with an exchange of “what if” thought experiments and analogies. They generally end in a standoff between “it’s a human life” and “my body, my choice.”

I came across this excellent podcast on ways to get past the standoff.

https://www.str.org/w/interview-josh-brahm-responding-to-my-body-my-choice-

The podcast is a discussion between Josh Brahm from the Equal Rights Institute and Jim Barton of Stand to Reason.

It is 58 minutes long. You can skip the introductions and the chitchat and start at the 7:00 mark if you like. If you want to cut to the chase, you can start at 12:30.

Brahm makes the anti-abortion case well. Along the way, he presents some compelling principle-testing scenarios that I had not heard before and responds to some new inventive pro-abortion scenarios. He also describes how to keep the argument on track and even keep it light with a little humor. Check it out.