Host Colbe Mazzarella interviews guest Emily Geiger about her work at the Equal Rights Institute.
WBCA Podcasts
Life Matters
The following commentary does not necessarily reflect the views of the staff and management of WBCA or the Boston Neighborhood Network. If you would like to express another opinion, you can address your comments to Boston Neighborhood Network, 302-5 Washington Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 0-2119. To arrange a time for your own commentary, you can call WBCA at 617-708-3215 or email radio at bnnmedia.org. Hello and welcome to Life Matters, where we interview guests who protect human life from conception to natural death. I'm your host, Attorney Colby Mazzarella, and our guest today is Emily Geiger, who works for Equal Rights Institute and also makes amazing, clever, and instructive videos. So welcome to the show, Emily. So much for having me Colby, it's a pleasure to be here today. Well, I am a fan of your videos, and we will have a couple of them for samples today. Wonderful. It's so great to be here, and I'm honored that you're a fan of my videos. Thank you. All right, so we have a little introductory video to your group, your more formal title is Director of Education and Outreach for Equal Rights Institute. And let's play the introductory video first to explain what the whole overview of the group is. But sometimes, it feels like we've lost all hope that anyone will ever change their mind on abortion, and how can we expect people to become pro-life when everyone is shouting and attacking each other, and no one is listening? We think there's a better way. Hi, I'm Josh Brahm, the co-founder and president of Equal Rights Institute, and I want to tell you how we're changing the way people dialogue about abortion. Our relational approach helps our students refute the toughest approach-wise arguments while loving the person in front of them. Our team of creative professionals design rich content which is both comprehensive and practical. We don't water down arguments or skip over important nuances that often get lost in political talking points. We believe so strongly in the arguments we teach because we've tested them during thousands of conversations in order to create innovative pro-life apologetics that we're registered with every day pro-choice people. I want pro-life advocates to realize we can help pro-choice people actually change their minds and become pro-life, just like our team has experienced time and time again. She kind of sat back in her chair and went, "I never thought I'd be saying this, but I think I have to be pro-life now. Like, I cannot come up with any good things to say against a single argument you've made." I want to share something a student wrote because it's the experience that I hope every pro-life advocate has when they discover us. Before I found ERI, I had never learned practical, logical, clear dialogue tips, even though I let a pro-life college group. I muddled through but I didn't even know exactly what we needed to improve. I just knew what was happening around me wasn't very effective. ERI was the answer to that. I think your course and content should be required for any student pro-life group and I highly recommend it to my friends now. ERI is the only pro-life resource I feel confident sending my pro-choice friends to. Helping people connect for life-changing conversations is the mission of our team at ERI. We help people deliver the pro-life message in a persuasive way that can actually reach the other side. Anyone looking at our political climate knows we don't need more shouting. We need more dialogue. So how did you get involved in ERI? I started getting involved in Equal Rights Institute in college. Up until that point, I had always been pro-life but I had never been involved in the pro-life movement anyway because honestly, as a pro-life high school student, I didn't really see the issue of abortion as affecting me personally and so it just wasn't a high priority in my life until I got off to college and I realized how hostile today's college campuses really are towards the pro-life position and towards conservatives and towards Christians. There is so much animosity there that it kind of jiggered me into realizing that I had to do something. Like for example, for all of 2016, we had a local pregnancy center in my town that just offers free resources for pregnant and parenting individuals. They were hosting their annual fundraising banquet. I'm sure many of your viewers have been to a pregnancy center fundraising banquet. They're wonderful. They were hosting their annual fundraising banquet and they actually decided to do that on my college campus. What happened was the students of my campus figured out this is what was happening and they managed to organize an insane number of students to just line the hallways of the entire building where the event was happening with signs screaming at all the members of the community that came to just support free resources for pregnant and parenting families. That is what I walked into and what made me realize that not only was this issue personal to me and to my campus, but that I had a unique opportunity to actually reach students on my campus. As a young pro-life woman, I could engage them in conversation and I could start this. I could open up the conversation in a way that would change hearts and minds. That's when I partnered with Equal Rights Institute. When I found their training and I learned how to effectively talk to pro-choice people through changing hearts and minds in dialogue, I became passionate about the issue and now I work for Equal Rights Institute full time. Wow, thank you for doing that. What have you experienced people saying or doing after hearing the Equal Rights Institute point of view? We find that pro-choice people are much more open to the pro-life position and to changing their minds and many of them do after having conversations with one of our trained staff people or volunteers. Maybe my favorite example is I was talking to this pro-choice college student by the name of Anna and Anna came up to an outreach table that we were doing. This is something we regularly do on college campus all over the country. Our staff comes in or we'll train a college pro-life club there in order to run outreach tables on their own campus where they engage in dialogue one-on-one with pro-choice students. And I had this student named Anna approach me and we probably talked for about 30 minutes and I thought it was a really, really productive conversation we were going back and forth. I was able to get her walls down and get her feeling comfortable with me so that we could really just have an open and honest discussion about abortion and what she thought about it. And as we wrapped up that conversation she had to go to class, I honestly didn't think that it was that exciting of a conversation. We hadn't changed her mind in front of my face because the reality is most people aren't humble enough to change their minds about really serious issues in front of other people's faces. It's something where we have a really good dialogue and then you have to take the time to go think about it afterwards. And that's exactly what Anna did. Anna went back to her dorm room that night and thought about the conversation we had had and thought about it and thought about it and thought about it so that a month and a half later she actually reached out to me via Facebook and asked if we could meet and chat again. And so I made an appointment with her and we went and got pizza and I met her and the moment that she sat down she looked across the table with me and said, "I have not been able to stop thinking about that argument that you made." And I was hoping we could chat more about abortion because truly what you said has impacted me so much that I haven't been able to think about anything else and I think I might have to become her life. And so we talked for another two hours that day about different arguments and things that were holding her back. And at the end of the conversation she ultimately did become pro-life. And she asked us to train her in how to talk to other people about abortion so that she could change their hearts and minds too. People don't typically change their minds in one conversation but through our conversations with them and this repeated interaction and the kinds of training we do on college campuses so that pro-life clubs can have repeated interactions with students. We see long-term culture shifts happen there where choice students are becoming open to the pro-life position, respecting pro-life first and ultimately becoming pro-life themselves. Well, do you happen to remember what argument it was that was most undermined? She was really concerned about making sure women have rights to do what they want with their bodies. She was kind of coming from a women's equality perspective and major concerns about like if the government is regulating abortion that means that the government is stepping in and regulating women's bodies in a way that the government doesn't step in and regulate men's bodies and that feels really unfair. So that was what was kind of going on mentally for her and what I was able to talk through and help her to see that abortion ultimately isn't a tool for women's equality. Abortion is just really moving that oppression elsewhere and killing other humans in order to have this weird attempt to make women equal to men when women are equal to men. We don't need abortion to make that happen and we were kind of able to work through that together. Wow, well, let's look at the first of your videos, the first example we have today. It's just going to be done dangerously. Actually, you can't possibly measure the number of secret illegal abortions happening. Yeah, we can. You can have a secret abortion, you're right, but you can't have a secret birth. Exactly. That's why we measure birth rates because if the abortion rate was staying the same regardless of the gallery, then the birth rate would stay the same, but it doesn't. The birth rate goes up when abortion is restricted, and like the 10,000 more babies that were born here, restrictive state level abortion policies were associated with not having an abortion at all. Well, some people are still going to have a dangerous abortion. True, some people. Yeah, and I don't want anybody to go hurt an abortion, legal or illegal, but I don't think we could hold a law hostage because of citizens threatening to hurt themselves. Who are you? We don't keep human rights violations legal just to make them safer for people to keep doing them. What? If abortion is a human rights violation, if it's the killing of innocent humans without adequate justification, then that's not the kind of thing we just keep legal. Any abortion is likely to stop the majority of abortions, and it would have a compounding effect over time as more people unlearn it. It's okay to kill humans while they're yet unborn and instead learn that all humans have and discern- How many videos have you posted like that? Oh, hundreds upon hundreds. Probably I would estimate about 800 videos at this point. I've been filming daily TikTok videos for about the last three years. So if someone wants to see them, what should they look for? Equal Rights Institute is the name of our organization, and that's what our handler is on every platform. So all the videos are originally posted on TikTok, but if you're not on TikTok, we repost the exact same content to all our other platforms as well. So you can find it on Instagram, you can find it on Facebook, you can find them on Twitter, and you can find them on YouTube, all at Equal Rights Institute. Wow. So how many views like subscribers have you had? So we have in terms of followers, which is people that watch our content every single day, that's about 26,000 followers, but individual videos get far more views than that. For example, that video that was just played has about 640,000 views on it right now. My views on average go in the hundreds of thousands for every video. Wow. Let's look at the second where we have two videos to look at today, and we'll see the second one and get that one pulled up. The definition of biological life, if he does not alive until viability. Really? What is the definition of biological life? It must have cellular organization, fetuses have that, cellular reproduction. Their cells are duplicating DNA and dividing to form new cells, yeah? Growth and development. Definitely growing. Energy use. Yep. Homeostasis. Mm-hmm. No, they don't. They need the mother's body. No, they maintain homeostasis. They don't acquire nutrients if they're on a cord, but once the nutrients in oxygen have been received to the placenta, they use those nutrients themselves to maintain their own homeostasis. Response to their environment, fetuses do that too, and the ability to adapt. And they do that. By the definition of biological life, a fetus is definitely alive. Well, it also doesn't qualify as human under the definition of human, which is to put the definition of human, it has to be recognizable as such, which it isn't. To be a member of the species means to be a living organism with the DNA of that species. It has nothing to do with what the creature looks like, it has to do with what the creature is. The fetus is a living organism with the DNA of the human species. It's a biological human. That's not controversial. That's great. So, first of all, would you define homeostasis for those who don't know that, maybe I missed it in the video, and explain how that works for a fetus. Sure. So, homeostasis is one of the requirements that biologists have given to say what is alive and what is not alive. So there's seven different biological requirements that you have to have to be considered alive. And this counts for any kind of living things. This is true for humans. This is true for grass. So, the same like seven qualifications of being alive would differentiate, say, a blade of grass from a rock. A rock is not alive, grass is alive. We all know this. And it's because of those seven qualifications. So one of them is homeostasis, which is the idea that this organism is able to maintain itself. It is like using the nutrients that are coming into it in order to maintain health, rather than it having to have something else that's maintaining its health for it. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it has to create all of its own nutrients. It's often the same way that you and I don't create our own nutrients. So you and I, we have to eat food, right? And then our body is able to use that food, the calories that we've intakeed, in order to maintain our health. And so things can be brought in from the outside, like we eat the food. And then it becomes our own homeostasis. The same is true of a fetus. So a fetus does not require nutrients of its own accord, same way that you and I don't have to be brought in from the outside. But once those nutrients have come into a fetus, the fetus then digests those nutrients. The cells in it know how to take those nutrients and use it to maintain all the things that it needs to grow and develop. So it has its own little homeostatic bubble, so to speak, where it is knowing how to maintain itself. And so the fact that it has homeostasis, along with it has the other six requirements of biological life as well, mean that a fetus is living. Now there are other things that we need to know about the unborn. Like I always say, the unborn is a living human organism, and those are three separate things. That video right there was just about the idea that the unborn is living. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's human or an organism. Those are separate topics we have to explore. And that's one of the things that I love doing on my TikTok channel is breaking down the abortion debate into the tiniest possible chunks that help people understand each individual piece of what's going on. The biology of what's going on, the philosophy of what's going on. And I take all of my inspiration from the comments on my channel. So as you saw in those videos, I screenshot comments that pro-choice people will make claiming things like, well, a fetus isn't alive according to biological life. So I use that as my inspiration to say, yeah, actually it is and here's why. And I break down and explain why it is alive. So that's the most recent video that I saw. But one before that was about the idea of back alley abortions. If we don't have abortion available legally, it's just going to happen dangerously. How do we respond to that idea as a for life advocate? That's what I try to talk through in each of these videos is take little pieces of the abortion debate and break them down for people. So they feel like they have an idea of how to respond. And it also helps pro-choice people to learn the truth as well. So if someone wanted to search for a specific topic, they could go on their favorite platform and search for Equal Rights Institute, for example, personhood. And that would come up with that topic? Exactly. So if you went on our YouTube channel, you could put in Equal Rights Institute personhood and you'll see all the videos that I've made that have talked about that. You can also, if you go on our TikTok channel, the way TikTok works is you can put a little title on every single video. And so you'll see, actually in quote marks, the name of the pro-choice argument that was being made that caused me to create this video. So for that most recent one we saw, you can see the title as, "A fetus Isn't Alive." And so there you go. Oh, now I'm going to learn how to respond to that claim if I click on this video. Nice. What do people tell you about the impact of your videos on them? We've had a number of people tell us that they've become pro-life because of watching our TikTok videos, which is an amazing story. But even more than that, I get scores of pro-life people commenting, sending the emails, running into me on the street. At this point, I have made enough of these videos and gotten enough views that I do get recognized random places for making them, which is a wild experience in and of itself. But I will find pro-life people who will tell me about how the videos have empowered them to feel like they know how to respond to these claims, because the reality is the abortion debate is very complicated. There's lots of different facets, lots of different things that pro-choice people can bring up. And I think that one of the reasons that pro-life people tend to just keep their mouth shut when they hear things like they're pro-choice neighbor or making a comment about abortion or they're pro-choice aunt to make a comment about abortion. Most pro-life people tend to just not say anything and reply because they're not sure what to say. And they don't want to get into an argument, into a position where they feel like they don't have the answer, or they're going to say the wrong thing, and that's going to end up turning the person further away from the pro-life position. So I think a lot of pro-life people just don't say anything at all. Whereas my videos have taught tons of pro-life people how they can effectively respond. Here are things that you can say, and here's now a resource that you know you have at your fingertips that you can go to to pull up answers to these things, to quickly educate yourself or even to send that video to your pro-choice friend or your pro-choice neighbor or your pro-choice aunt in order to let me explain it to them and use that as a conversation starter between the two of you. So it's really empowering to people to help them figure out how do I respond and have the courage to do that. That's what I've been told by a lot of our viewers. Nice. I see that you brought your own pregnancy into part of the videos. Yes, I am currently 34 weeks pregnant, which is an amazing thing to be able to talk about in my videos. I'm very open about the fact that I'm pregnant and I announced fairly early on our social media channels because I wanted our viewers to be able to walk through the pregnancy journey with me. And I've talked openly about the ups and downs of pregnancy. Pregnancy is hard, and I think that pro-life people should be willing to embrace that fact and say yes, pregnancy is hard, pregnancy is beautiful, and we'll be as the pro-life women are here to help you through that, here to be a support system for you. We're not going to shut eye away from the fact that pregnancy is difficult, but we're going to talk about it and we're going to be that support system. So yes, I am 34 weeks pregnant and I love showing off the baby bump in my videos as often as I can and just letting people see that I am a real life young woman who is affected by the issue of abortion just like so many of my peers. And I think that's one of the reasons that so many young people resonate with my videos is they feel like I am like them, I understand them, and I'm also going through a pregnancy myself. And so I have some extra level of authority, I guess I would say to speak about it in their minds that really helps for them to want to hear what I have to say. Yes, I know that Equal Rights Institute also has some courses, if someone wants a more in-depth view, tell me about those. Yes, so we have currently two courses that we are publishing our third course actually next week. So on July 10th, our third course will be launched. I'll talk about the two that we have already first. So our equipped for life course is our flagship course and it trains you in how to effectively talk to someone about abortion. It's the course that I took when I was in college in order to teach me how to more effectively engage with the pro-choice students on my campus. So it'll train you in everything from just how do I even have a conversation with someone about such a controversial issue? How do I get their walls down? How do I get them out of fight mode into a place where we can just talk, we can have a respectful conversation? And then it'll teach you about basic pro-choice arguments, how to think through them, how to respond to them effectively, all the way up through what are the smartest pro-choice philosophers and professors in the world saying, how do I understand these really advanced pro-choice arguments and refute those in an effective manner? So it kind of covers the whole gamut of pro-choice argumentation and how to respond effectively. That's our equipped for life course. Then our second course is our sidewalk counseling masterclass. So what we specialize in at Equal Rights Institute is apologetics, is training people how to effectively talk about abortion. But I like to say there's two very different conversations you might have about abortion. You might have a conversation about abortion with your pro-choice friend or neighbor or family member where we're talking about abortion in this kind of academic way. It's this hypothetical over there that we're talking about and we're trying to figure out whether it's right or wrong. That's one conversation and that's what the equipped for life course is you had to do. But the sidewalk counseling masterclass teaches you how to talk about abortion with someone who is in that right now, with someone who is walking into an abortion clinic or is actively considering an abortion. How do we reach that person? Because this is no longer a hypothetical. Is this moral? Is this not kind of a conversation? They are living it. They feel like they're in crisis mode right now. And so the things I'm going to say, the way that I'm going to behave in that conversation is a little different than the way that I'm going to talk to my pro-choice aunt who isn't actively experiencing this and doesn't have that kind of personal crisis thing where they're in that emotional state. And so we also train people in how to talk to abortion minded and abortion but vulnerable women through our sidewalk counseling masterclass. And then next week on July 10, we are publishing our third course, which is specifically targeted towards high school students. It's called equipped for life academy. So equipped for life academy is designed to train high school students how to effectively think and talk about abortion. And it's designed for what we would call a mixed audience, meaning I fully expect that in most of the schools that are going to use our curriculum, you're going to have some students in the classroom that are already pro-life, some students in the classroom that are pro-choice and some students in the classroom who really don't know what they think about abortion and honestly don't want to be talking about it. And we have to cater to all three of those types of students at the same time, convincing them why they shouldn't be pro-life and teaching them how to talk about it effectively and how to evangelize, all without turning off the students that don't currently share the pro-life position, how to engage them, change their mind and get them involved. So that's what the equipped for life course is about. That's an excellent spectrum of possible courses and possible audiences that you've been working with. And I especially like that you can make the conversation pleasant and positive so that even people are coming back for more. And I think that people who have an idea about sidewalk counseling, that it's harassment and hard on the person, I think when they see your course on it, they would find out that it can be very respectful and very positive. So if, again, if anyone in the audience wants more, wants to see more, you can go to Equal Rights Institute on any social media platform. And we're very appreciative that you're doing this. We would like to have you back in the future as things develop over the years and see what's new in your technology and your approach that's been so successful. I would love that. Thank you so much for having me, Colby, and yes, Equal Rights Institute or just visit EqualRightsInstitute.com and that'll get you links to all those platforms and all those courses. That's kind of your home base page just searching Equal Rights Institute. Thank you. And to the audience, thank you too for watching and see you next week on Life Matters. [Music] The preceding commentary does not necessarily reflect the views of the staff and management of WBCA or the Boston Neighborhood Network. If you would like to express another opinion, you can address your comments to Boston Neighborhood Network, 302-5 Washington Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02119. To arrange a time for your own commentary, you can call WBCA at 617-708-3215 or email radio at BNNMedia.org. [BLANK_AUDIO]