Speaking to about 75 mostly young adults at an event sponsored by Ottawa Against Abortion Jan. 8, Gray offered strategies for changing hearts and minds in circumstances they might encounter at work or among friends and relatives.
“If we can focus on what we should do” then we are “more likely in times of fear, crisis” or unexpected circumstances “to do the right thing,” she said. “One in four unborn children has their lives taken every year through abortion.”
Gray laid out several possible scenarios: What should I do if I am a physician and a woman 20 weeks pregnant has had an ultrasound revealing she is going to have a girl and decides she wants an abortion? What should I do if I am a construction worker and one of my co-workers says his girlfriend told him last night she is pregnant and they are considering abortion?
What if I am a mother picking up my child at school and another mother tells me she is pregnant, but there is a poor prenatal diagnosis and her doctor is suggesting “early induction, a code word for abortion”?
“What holds us back from doing what we ought to do is the very same thing that drives a woman to abortion: fear,” Gray said.
Women are afraid of what their husbands or boyfriends are going to say, she said. They are afraid of what their church is going to say, afraid of what their friends will say. She will do what she shouldn’t do, have an abortion “out of fear,” Gray said.
“Sometimes if we speak up, people respond poorly,” Gray admitted. “If we respond well, most people don’t respond poorly.”
The best teacher of practical skills and tactics is Jesus, she said. In the Gospel of Luke, chapter 10, a young lawyer asks Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus responds with a question: “What does the law say?” The young man answers correctly that one is to love God and love one’s neighbour.
Jesus asks the question to help the man identify “a view internally he already had and to draw it out of him,” she said. “We follow in the footsteps of the Teacher by asking questions.”
When the young lawyer then asks Jesus “Who is my neighbour,” he tells the story of the Good Samaritan.
“Jesus could have thrown out some principles,” but instead He illustrates the principle through a story with characters and circumstances the person listening can “relate to visually,” she said.
In a conversation Gray had with a teenager who thought abortion was acceptable, the teen said: “If you have a fetus in one hand and a baby in another, you pick the baby.”
“You need to ask the question: what has she communicated? Is it a case of the stronger versus the weaker?” So she asked, “If you have a strong person on one hand and a weak person on another, do you choose the stronger person?”
Then she told a story of a picture she had seen on Facebook posted by the wife of a paramedic showing the top of a car that had become submerged into the river. A young mother and her 10- month-old child had been in the vehicle and when the paramedic arrived they were both sitting on top of the sinking car. The paramedic could only rescue one person at a time.
Gray asked the teen who the paramedic should rescue first? The baby, the teen answered. Gray said the paramedic did rescue the baby. “Do you think he did the right thing?” and the teen said, “Yes.”
Gray then explained that in this scenario it seems you put the weaker person first. “She holds a view that compels her to, by reason of vulnerability and weakness, protect the fetus.”
Gray offered “three golden questions” for people to draw on in conversations about abortion: If something is growing, is it alive? If someone has human parents, aren’t they human? We humans have human rights, don’t we?
“Two human parents cannot produce a cat,” she said.
Gray explained how scientifically everyone’s life begins at fertilization. A fetus is like a Polaroid photo that has all the information for a full snapshot, but has not fully developed yet.
“If we believe in human rights, a human should get human rights regardless of age,” she said.
Most reasons to oppose abortion focus on the mother, she said. They include rape, incest, poverty, lack of support, career or diagnosis of disability for the fetus. Gray urged people to find common ground, to indicate they share deep concerns about the injustice of rape, for example, by saying the rapist should go to prison.
“But should the child have a death sentence?”
In cases of poverty, she would agree how challenging it is to raise children in poverty, drawing from her own parents’ experiences, but then ask, “If you were the mother of a born child and were in poverty, would it be okay to kill the child?”
Sometimes logical arguments and “airtight reasoning” do not get through, Gray said. This indicates there is a “problem of the heart” and the heart must be converted.
Either the person has had an abortion or knows someone who has had an abortion, she said. Gray encouraged truly listening to people to find out their story, to uncover the past hurt. This often softens their demeanour, she said.