We all want more abortion-seeking women to change their minds about abortion and choose life.
The most important organization that can facilitate such a change of mind in a woman is a life-affirming center, commonly known in the pro-life community as a Pregnancy Help Center (PHC).
What can a life-affirming center do in order to bring in more abortion-seeking women?
First and foremost, the center’s leaders must ask themselves what messaging, both words and images, will best resonate with those young women.
Messaging includes more than just the center’s advertising.
It also includes the words used, and the words avoided, when any center team member interacts with a young woman at any time.
For example, the center’s call intake coordinator, medical team members such as the registered nurse and sonographer, and all counselors should be trained in exactly what to say and not say.
So what messaging should centers use that will resonate with a young woman?
Two things are key.
First, as discussed in last week’s article, the woman believes that abortion is a medical decision, so everything she sees and hears when she interacts with a life-affirming center should resonate with her belief.
If asked later about her visit with the center, the woman should say something like, “That center was a great women’s healthcare facility.”
Second, and this one can be hard for us pro-lifers to accept, the woman believes that it is absolutely her choice, and no one else’s, whether or not she gets an abortion.
Therefore, to stay “in tune” with what an abortion-determined woman believes, the life-affirming center’s job is not to convince her that abortion is an objectively immoral act, even though it is.
Attempting to do so will more than likely push her right out the door in the blink of an eye and send her over to the nearest Planned Parenthood.
Instead, the center’s job is to give the woman objective truthful information in a non-manipulative manner: information about an abortion procedure, as well as information about all the support available to her if she chooses to carry her pregnancy to term.
After giving the woman that information, the center’s team members should respectfully allow the woman to make her decision.
This signals to the woman that the team at the center trusts that she will make the best decision for herself, even if she objectively does not end up making the best decision.
Your initial reaction to that may be something like, “If we do it that way aren’t most women still going to choose abortion?”
I used to think that too, but after seeing the results of the number of abortion-seeking women who changed their minds and chose life at one life-affirming center that uses this exact approach, I changed my mind.
In the next article, we’ll talk about that center’s results and why their approach is so effective.
Brett
This article was published in Heroic Media‘s weekly newsletter
Jim Pinard
All child-bearing women alive today were born into the “pro-choice” propaganda era. The propaganda surrounding this issue has been so immersive for so long that most believe the rhetoric and don’t realize why. So unless they are exposed to a different point of view to re-direct their empowerment, they cannot conceive of a different choice.
In my business (video, advertising), ALL of our work revolves around one premise:
It’s not about what we have to say, only about what the audience is WILLING to hear.
Thank you for this article.
Brett Attebery
Thank you for your insights Jim!
You make an important point about “what the audience is willing to hear.”
What many in the pro-life community do not understand is that a woman facing an unexpected pregnancy is not “willing to hear” about the morality of the pro-life message.
She is in “predator mode,” 100% focused on survival.
To begin the process of winning her over to a choice for life, all messaging must be focused on the woman and her needs/wants.
If she detects that any of your motivations are about the life growing in the woman’s womb, she will quickly opt out of the conversation, and you lose the opportunity to work with her.
Brett