‘Come take on the pro-lifer’

Jay Watts once stood on a college campus with a sign over his head that said, “Come take on the pro-lifer.”

And boy, did they.

“I stood in the middle of a lot of people shouting at me, ‘Who do you think you are? How dare you tell people what they can do?’ But within minutes, they were listening and talking and we were having a conversation,” said Watts, a speaker and writer for Life Training Institute, a pro-life organization.

Why? Because Watts wouldn’t shout back.

“Nasty is out there, and you have to be prepared to meet it. It tells you you’re not allowed to talk, to ‘grow up, this is the modern world,’” he said.

It’s not an argument — it’s an attempt to intimidate, Watts said. “To respond to intimidation, we have to have our facts straight … prepare for that nastiness and return gracious argument. There seems to be a universal admiration for people who can keep their cool and answer calmly.”

You may not be able to change the mind of the person shouting in your face, but you never know who is listening to the exchange, he said.

When a pro-life person is engaging in a conversation with someone pro-choice, the part to focus on is whether or not the unborn is a human.

“I often use the ‘try it on the toddler’ method,” Watts said. “For instance, if there were a toddler that was the fifth of five children, she’s a tremendous financial burden on the family and both parents have to work as a result to make ends meet. Would we say it was OK to kill that child?”

Of course not, he said. And so the question is, “What is the unborn?”

If it is a human, Watts said, then it shouldn’t be OK to kill that child for financial reasons either.

“Before they (pro-choice people) get to arguing the issue of abortion, they are already assuming that they can do things to the unborn that they can’t do to other humans,” he said. “We have to show them that they can’t assume that.”

For more information, visit www.prolifetraining.com.