Easy-to-read guide to assist pro-abortion persons to choose pro-life views.
Stephanie Gray’s work “in the trenches” among college students has resulted in this easy-to-read guide to assist persons who may think they must support abortion to reconsider their views and adopt pro-life positions.
Not a scholarly, point-counterpoint debate text, Gray’s work is much person-focused. Pro-abortion people would most benefit from reading this work since she focuses not so much on what they believe but the person behind those beliefs. The book is filled with anecdotes of how she engaged with pro-abortion persons successfully—often people who were most hostile and aggressive at first—but who later saw in Gray a pro-lifer who helped them to resolve their own personal problems which compelled them to think that they had to support abortion.
Pro-life readers will also benefit from Gray’s emphasis that we should listen and ask questions of pro-abortion persons instead of arguing the issue logically (13). Gray recommends a three-step approach when discussing abortion with such persons: finding common ground, using stories and analogies to convey a pro-life truth, and asking questions of the pro-abortion individual (32).
Gary’s compassion towards abortion supporters is manifested in other areas, as when she affirms that “the pro-lifer’s task of being a voice for the pre-born also involves ministering compassion, love, and grace to the born” ([69]).
Finally, readers on both sides of the abortion issue will find some of Gray’s statements simply memorable. Her account of two young people who were conceived through in-vitro fertilization is joyous in one instance, heartbreaking in the other. When discussing why a pro-life friend would never drive a mother to an abortion clinic, a makeover of a common expression will stick in one’s mind: “Friends don’t drive friends to abortion clinics” (123; bold in original).