The fatal assumption
10th June 2020
Bernadette Waddelove, Student Support Officer
“Was there a particular event or moment that made you more committed to the pro-life cause?”
Our first question when interviewing last week was one which I remembered well from a couple of years ago when I was in their position. The answers vary considerably and are always of great interest. For some it’s gradual, for some it’s a very definite moment. All different, all as important and incredible.
But why do we ask this question? There is a very simple reason. Here at APS, we’ve long noticed that everyone involved in the movement undergoes a very definite ‘pro-life journey’. None of us are born activists, but either gradually, or suddenly, we somehow end up on the front line.
This observation was confirmed to us when we found The Making of Pro-life Activists: How Social Movement Mobilization Works by Ziad Munson (Chicargo:2009). In this study, Munson sought to understand why two identically brought up pro-lifers would produce one activist and one not.
His conclusion was that those who become activists are those who have gone through a mobilisation process consisting of:
(1) contact with the pro-life movement at a turning point in their lives
(2) initial activism in the pro-life movement
(3) the development of their pro-life beliefs, and
(4) full movement participation and sustained activism.
Each step depends on the previous one occurring, and all those in the study went through the process accidentally.
The Munson study also identified a fatal assumption – that those who become involved in the pro-life movement already had developed pro-life beliefs. Indeed, of those who became activists in the study, a quarter were pro-choice, a quarter were ambivalent about abortion, and about a half identified as pro-life – but with beliefs that were contradictory and undeveloped.
Furthermore, the two turning points which Munson identifies as having the MOST impact upon people are when we leave home for the first time, and when we graduate into the job market. And this is why pro-life societies and our students are so important to the movement. This gives them the opportunity to meet the pro-life movement at a turning point in their life, and allows us to help them along their journey to understanding the real pro-life position, thoroughly and consistently, at our events as they become pro-life activists.
So let us never make the mistake: never is anyone more likely to become involved in the pro-life movement again than at university.
So for the next couple of weeks we’re going to be celebrating our students and their stories about how they became involved in the pro-life movement.
Stay tuned to read their testimonies!
