Levi Harper is the Events Coordinator and Co-Founder of Badgers for Life.
It is a sunny afternoon on State Street in Madison, Wisconsin. A college student walks toward East Campus Mall, taking in the restaurants, music, and crowds around her. Then she hears a man’s voice booming through a speaker.
As she gets closer, she sees graphic anti-abortion signs and a man arguing with another young woman. “Abortion is murder,” he tells her, before calling her uneducated, stupid, and ignorant. When a nearby band begins playing loudly enough to drown him out, he shouts over the music that “God has prepared a place for His enemies.”
For someone who is pro-choice, this may be her first personal encounter with the pro-life movement. And she may walk away thinking: If this is what God’s love looks like, I want nothing to do with it.
As someone in the pro-life movement, I am always deeply distressed when I see these demonstrations come to campus. As a college student at a liberal university, I also know how they are received on campus: with unseriousness, obstinacy, and pure rage. “Why is a man telling me what to do with my body?” or “Oh great, here’s another Christian group telling me I’m going to hell.”
While I admire abolitionist groups for their conviction, willingness to educate, and ability to mobilize, I would like to propose that there is a better way to communicate the pro-life cause — one rooted in love, compassion, and care for the lives of both the woman and the baby.
Abortion abolitionists generally call for the immediate and complete criminalization of abortion and reject legislation that merely restricts abortion. Some abolitionist groups also argue that women who knowingly obtain abortions should be subject to criminal prosecution, although views on the appropriate punishment vary within the movement.
As an incrementalist, I approach the issue differently. I believe we have to take the culture where it is and save as many lives as we can while continuing to work toward greater protections for unborn life.
According to a January 2026 poll from the Pew Research Center, 66% of Americans ages 18 to 29 say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 34% say it should be illegal in all or most cases. On a college campus, that cultural reality matters.
Social Judgment Theory helps explain why. The theory argues that people evaluate persuasive messages according to their existing beliefs, placing them within a latitude of acceptance, non-commitment, or rejection. A message that falls too far into someone’s latitude of rejection is unlikely to persuade them. For someone who strongly identifies as pro-choice, an immediate call to completely criminalize abortion may fall far outside anything they are currently willing to consider.
Incrementalism begins closer to where people actually are, looking for common ground and achievable protections while continuing the larger conversation about the value of human life. But reaching people where they are requires more than simply choosing the right policy approach. It also requires us to think carefully about how we communicate. The following principles are tools that can help us navigate these conversations with greater clarity, compassion, and effectiveness.
Attack the argument, not the person
Calling someone stupid, ignorant, evil, or uneducated does nothing to strengthen our argument. It is an ad hominem attack, shifting the conversation away from the actual issue and toward the character or intelligence of the person standing across from us. If we believe our position is true, then we should be able to defend it without degrading the person who disagrees with us.
And we need to remember something important: we are coming to them. When we walk onto a college campus, approach someone on the street, or initiate a conversation about abortion, the responsibility is on us to communicate our beliefs in a way worth listening to. We cannot insult someone and then blame them for refusing to hear us. We can be better. It is on us, not them.
Hate the sin, not the sinner
While it is just an expression, it is also something deeply biblical. Jesus commands us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. That becomes especially important when talking about an issue as personal and painful as abortion.
We do not know the story of the person standing across from us. We do not know what she has experienced, what someone close to her has experienced, or what brought her to the beliefs she holds today. That should produce humility and compassion in us.
If we believe every human life possesses inherent dignity, then that dignity cannot suddenly disappear when someone disagrees with us. The people arguing with us have value too. The Bible should never become a weapon we lash at someone we are called to love. We can condemn what we believe is wrong without treating the person in front of us as our enemy.
Listen, not lecture
Listening does not mean surrendering our convictions. It means caring enough about other people to actually understand what they believe before deciding what they need to hear.
Too often, conversations about abortion become two people waiting for the other person to stop talking so they can respond. That is not listening. Listening means asking questions. What does he actually believe? Why does he believe it? What experiences shaped that belief? Where do we agree? Where do we actually disagree?
It was evident in the dialogue I witnessed on campus that both sides had much to learn about each other. Yet if we are the ones initiating the conversation, I believe the greater responsibility falls on us to listen first.
Educate, not berate
If we want to persuade people, we need to understand where they are starting from. Most college-aged people have grown up in a culture where abortion is legal and widely accepted. Yelling at them or immediately demanding a total ban is unlikely to change their minds.
Instead, we should educate. Ask what they actually believe. Explain fetal development, abortion laws, and what happens during pregnancy. Share stories from people they can relate to. Give them information they may have never heard before.
Our goal should not be to win a shouting match. It should be to move someone closer to understanding the value of human life.
Speak the truth in love
Abolitionists I have spoken with have told me that speaking the truth is love. There is something important in that argument. Love does not require us to abandon what we believe is true. But Scripture also tells Christians something about how truth should be communicated.
The book of Ephesians tells us to speak the truth in love. Colossians 4:6 tells us, “Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt.” Second Timothy 2:24–25 says that “the Lord’s servant should not be quarrelsome, but kind, gently instructing opponents.” And 1 Corinthians 13:1 warns, “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.”
Truth and love are not competing responsibilities. For Christians, they belong together.
We want to be more than noise. We need to be a voice that cuts through the chaos, listens to the hurt, and responds with grace, truth, and love. If our words are loud enough for an entire campus to hear but our love is nowhere to be found, then we are completely missing the basis for why we hold this conviction.
We have a responsibility to pro-choicers and unborn children to treat them with compassion, grace, dignity, and love. When we begin to compromise these basic needs, we’ve already lost. Let’s start winning for life again.