I joined the pro-life movement relatively late in life.
I wish I had written down the exact year, but the first time I made the trip to the March for Life in Washington D.C. was about the year 2010 when I was 44 years old.
I still recall the powerful emotions I felt while marching in the March for Life.
In my current work at Heroic Media, I experience those same emotions almost every day when we receive from our Pregnancy Help Center partners what we call “Save Stories.”
In those stories, it is impossible not to be emotionally moved when we see evidence that our team’s efforts resulted in a baby’s life being saved from abortion.
Our Emotions Draw Us In…
I don’t think I’ve met anyone who works full-time in the pro-life movement who wasn’t drawn into the work through some type of powerful emotional experience – including yours truly.
For people of goodwill who believe in an equal right to life for all human beings, it is impossible not to have strong emotional feelings about the reality that, every day, many thousands of tiny human beings are murdered in their mothers’ wombs.
We feel for these tiny humans, and we desperately want to stop the killing.
…But Then Our Emotions Betray Us
But do our strong desires to stop the killing lead to strong results in actually stopping the killing?
In the pro-life movement, how often do we stop to ask the question, “What would strong results in stopping the killing look like?”
In my experience, not often.
On the contrary, praise for those who work full-time in the pro-life movement is handed out based on how hard they try (intentions) to stop the killing, rather than how measurably successful (results) they are at actually stopping the killing.
Why is that?
In her book Dangerous Instincts: How Gut Instincts Betray Us, Mary Ellen O’Toole states that, “Making serious decisions in an emotional state takes away our analytical skills.”
I think that statement gets to the heart of the problem about the historical lack of success, as measured by market share, for Pregnancy Help Centers (PHCs) in the Pro-Life Business Industry.
Ultimately, it is the board members of the PHC who are responsible for holding PHC team members accountable for achieving the results the PHC’s benefactors want: as many lives saved from abortion as possible.
The problem is that those board members, who themselves were drawn into serving the PHC because of their own emotional desires to stop the killing, tend to evaluate the PHC’s performance based on how hard the PHC team members are trying, rather than using objective analytical measurements such as market share that would reveal whether or not the team at the PHC is actually succeeding.
Tomorrow, we’ll explore ideas about how board members of PHCs can start using objective analytics to measure the performance of the PHC team members.
Regards,
Brett