This article is excellent for understanding the vast majority of women who choose abortion and why. It is about right brain research showing how pro-choice women think about abortion, which is drastically different from that of the average pro-life activist.
When a woman faces an unplanned pregnancy, her main question is not “Is this a baby?”—with the assumed consequence that if she knows it to be so she will choose life. Women know, though often at the subconscious level, that the fetus is human, and that it will be killed by abortion. But that is the price a woman in that situation is willing to pay in her desperate struggle for what she believes to be her very survival.
I used to believe that women facing an unplanned pregnancy want to know whether their baby is a baby or not, the morality of the situation. Today I realize they generally do not. If you ask counsellors who see a lot of women facing unplanned pregnancies, they will confirm that fetal development is not something women are asking about. I believe it would be wise to recognize this as the pro-life movement, and that it would lead to better communication between those who are pro-life and those who are pro-choice if we did. The result would be the saved happy lives of women facing unplanned pregnancies, alongside the saved lives of their children.
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Great find Andrea. I feel like saying, ‘At last’. Here is an understanding that realizes the message may or may not be heard depending on the ‘way’ one communicates. I can recall countless times hearing, “If they would just be logical or reasonable or rational then they would see or agree or be pro life”. These plaints assume that the ‘audience’ is starting from the same point as the speaker. Unfortunate assumption because where one starts determines where one ends up. This dissimilar starting point often leads to frustration, anger, disrespect and despair and that is sad because these consequences are due to not recognizing the starting point issue. This article points out that what one ‘hears’ or ‘sees’ determines what one does and therefore if one frames the message in a way that the ‘audience’ hears and sees then hope is legitimate. I think the ads mentioned in the article are very helpful.
I agree with you that generally, women who agree to abortion know that it’s a baby and they are willing to kill it anyway, for whatever reason. But how then can one explain the reported success of ultrasound machines in pregnancy counselling centres? To answer my own question, maybe those machines do something different than just showing the woman that “yes, it’s a baby with a heartbeat”. Maybe they jump-start the bonding process between the mother and the baby, and that’s why the mothers have a harder time aborting afterwards – in other words, more than just realizing that the “tissue” is a baby, the mothers actually start to fall in love with it, as is natural.
Good critique of that article here:
http://www.str.org/articles/the-vanishing-pro-life-apologist
This is a good reference Navi. The critique is good. What I saw in the ‘Abortion: A Failure to Communicate’ article was an understanding that the listener may not be ‘able’ to hear the message and it is helpful to understand how one hears. I would venture to say that the article and the critique are both valid. It seems that it would be wise to always remember the unborn is a person and abortion ends their life and people need to know the whole of that. It would also be helpful to incorporate an approach that understands how the ‘listener’ may be ‘hearing’. When McLuhan wrote ‘the medium is the message’ he was stating the medium influences how the message is perceived. The ‘Communication’ article is talking about is how the ‘medium’ may be of such a design that the message can not be received. Knowing this, then, the challenge becomes how to embody the message in a medium that is connected to the ‘audience’ – then the ‘audience’ can ‘hear’ the message..
Thanks, Navi, for that critique. I don’t agree with it for a bunch of reasons, but I’ll try to find time to lay those out a bit later. Thank you for sending!!