Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: I’m Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, and this is the Orthodox Engagement podcast. The Orthodox Church has been around for two thousand years and has a robust tradition of confidently going into the world with the Gospel, meeting people, whoever and wherever they are. On this show, you’ll hear in-depth interviews that are about those encounters, stories of life, of ministry, of struggle, of conversion, of contact. You might hear things you disagree with—you might hear things I disagree with—but today we connect, and we connect because of Christ. In today’s world what we need most is neither polemic nor compromise, but engagement.

Welcome to the Orthodox Engagement podcast. I am here today with Emily Wilkinson, who is the new president and executive director of the revitalizing Orthodox Christians for Life, an organization founded in 1986, but which fell dormant about 20 years ago. Emily and her leadership team are determined to reestablish Orthodox Christians for Life’s parish ministry program, mobilizing lay people to serve their church and community through affiliated Orthodox Christians for Life ministries, and the group’s activities will focus on prayer, education, and service. Emily, welcome to Orthodox Engagement.

Ms. Emily Wilkinson: Thank you so much, Father. It’s an absolute honor to be joining you.

Fr. Andrew: Thank God. Before we start talking about Orthodox Christians for Life, I thought we might discuss your own background a bit, just so people can get to know you. You reside in southern California now, but is that where you actually grew up?

Ms. Wilkinson: Actually, I grew up in several different states, but spent most of my childhood in Ohio, and then my college years until my mid-20s in Montana, so I’ve been in California for about six years now.

Fr. Andrew: Do you mind me asking why you moved around a number of times when you were younger? I have a similar background, so I’m just sort of curious about that.

Ms. Wilkinson: Yeah, well my dad was a professor, and he worked at different universities, so we moved a lot. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Gotcha. So were you always a committed Orthodox Christian? Is your family Orthodox?

Ms. Wilkinson: My family is Orthodox. I was baptized Lutheran, and my family converted when I was about five, so I consider myself “bunk-bed Orthodox”: not quite cradle, since I do remember before that, but…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s great!

Ms. Wilkinson: My dad was ordained to the diaconate when I was a child, and actually ordained to the priesthood a couple years ago. He’s started a mission parish in eastern Washington.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, wow. Wow. Beautiful. How did you become involved in the pro-life movement?

Ms. Wilkinson: It’s something that I’ve always felt drawn toward, and I think it began when I was about 10 years old. I remember my family attended a rally on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and there was some congressman or representative up there speaking, and I remember my mother told me to cover my ears, so of course I didn’t. [Laughter] I was an extremely curious child, and I sort of cupped them over my hears, and I heard him describe an abortion procedure. That was sort of the first time I really learned about abortion. We have these moments throughout childhood—and even into adulthood, in my experience—where we learn about some new and terrible thing in the world. For me, growing up, some of those things were the fact that we eat animals, or the existence of war, the fact that people kill each other. But this, I remember that that was one of those moments. It really shocked me and devastated me as a child.

Then later on during high school, I remember finding a book on my parents’ bookshelf called 99 Ways to Stop Abortion by Joe Scheidler, who’s considered the grandfather of the pro-life movement. I was very inspired by that. And I was attending a Catholic high school, and I had this fear that if anyone in my class became pregnant, they would have an abortion, like they weren’t educated on the Catholic Church’s teaching, they just weren’t particularly interested, they didn’t know, they didn’t know about abortion, so I had this idea to start a pro-life club at my school. Now this is actually fairly common: we have thousands of pro-life clubs all over the country in colleges and high schools, but at the time it was just this kind of weird, novel idea.

So I did that, and then I went on to do it again in college; I started another club. Then also during college I also ended up working at a pregnancy center, so I helped with their marketing and outreach. Where I attended school, in Bozeman, Montana, there was no March for Life in January, so I started the March for Life in my little town. To my knowledge, that’s still continued to this day.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. That’s got to be cold up there in Montana in January!

Ms. Wilkinson: Yeah, it’s pretty cold. You could be marching through the snowdrifts.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Ms. Wilkinson: And what else? I coordinated some “40 Days for Life” campaigns, and that’s an international prayer vigil that takes place 40 days prior to Western Easter and then also 40 days in the fall, where people gather and commit to pray outside of their local abortion center, maybe once a week for an hour a week, or as often as they can. These local groups try to have as many people praying for 40 days as possible. So I did that. We had a local abortion clinic down the freeway in Montana. After a couple of years, glory to God, it closed, so we did see the power of prayer in a very real sense.

I was just kind of involved in all these different aspects in the pro-life movement, kind of dipping my toes in all these different things, and eventually I ended up getting hired by Students for Life of America as their West Coast regional coordinator. My job was basically to represent the organization in California, Arizona, and Nevada, and provide resources and support and training to pro-life students and help them start pro-life clubs in college and high school. I would travel all over the place and speak to different student clubs, and we would go out and do events on campuses. We would maybe set up informative displays and get into conversations with other students about abortion and human dignity and all these issues, just trying to start dialogue on campuses and really train and equip the students to be able to defend the sanctity of life in their schools. All of these experiences have felt kind of like stepping-stones along the way and have just really been invaluable as I begin this new chapter with OCLife.

Fr. Andrew: Tell us about— I like that sort of short nickname, OCLife. It probably gets a little difficult to say, “Orthodox Christians for Life,” over and over again. With “Ancient Faith,” we often say just, “Ancient Faith: AFM, AFR…” So tell us about OCLife. How did it first begin in the 1980s?

Ms. Wilkinson: It was started by a local group of Orthodox Christians on the East Coast who felt that there was this significant lack of understanding and acceptance of the Church’s teaching on abortion and other life issues among the Orthodox community. Prior to that, in 1984, His Grace Bishop Job of Hartford and New England had commissioned the formation of the Orthodox Pro-Life Action Committee, or OPLAC, for his diocese. Meanwhile, Fr. John Kowalczyk was the diocese coordinator for the Diocese of Eastern Pennsylvania, so there were people kind of doing little local things. And then in ‘85, Dn. John and Matushka Valerie Protopapas approached their bishop, Bishop Peter of the Diocese of New York and New Jersery, to ask for his blessing to begin presenting an educational program to different parishes throughout the diocese; he blessed them to do that and formed a department for the coordination of pro-life activities. All of that kind of turned into this bigger effort. They kind of said, “We want to have a national, pan-Orthodox organization to encourage more activity like what we’re doing on the local level.”

Fr. Andrew: You know, Fr. John Kowalczyk, whom you mentioned, he was one of my professors in seminary, at St. Tikhon’s. He especially led the local prison ministry internship there that we all had to do. I had no idea that he was involved with the pro-life movement. I don’t know, he might have mentioned it, but it got lost to me at some point.

All right, it started in the 1980s with various local initiatives kind of eventually combining together and working together and so forth. What did they do together along the way after they kind of started working together?

Ms. Wilkinson: The big focus was the March for Life, Orthodox attendance at the March for Life in DC, which takes place every January. I think that started in 1987. To this day, we have Orthodox that gathered every year: they’ll be gathering again this year for the March for Life. And also, they I think kind of were instrumental in coordinating the hierarchical attendance, which we have great representation on the level of our bishops at the March for Life. We see them standing up on the stage and walking with us. So they got that started. They continued to give presentations at churches and different church events. They produced newsletters. You would sort of send in your annual $10 dues and get your quarterly newsletter and be a member.

One of their biggest accomplishments is that they were instrumental in coordinating an amicus brief, which was submitted to the United States Supreme Court in 1989, in the case of Planned Parenthood v. Webster, which was supporting the State of Missouri in an effort to overturn Roe v. Wade. To this day, this amicus brief is published by Ancient Faith Publishing in a little booklet form—you can order it on the website—and it’s just a really nice overview of the Church’s teaching. It just gives a really nice kind of summary. So they were an active and I would say successful grassroots effort for many years.

Fr. Andrew: So what happened that it kind of dropped off?

Ms. Wilkinson: I think the short answer is it just wasn’t sustainable. The founders were aging, eventually experiencing health problems—later on, Dn. John passed away—and it was a volunteer effort, so it couldn’t be maintained. Organizations that rely completely on volunteers are just almost impossible to sustain because, first of all, you just can’t accomplish as much without funding and employees, people dedicating themselves full time to something. And second of all, you have no guarantee that you have a really good thing going with your volunteers. You have no guarantee when those volunteers are no longer available, that new leadership will be able to step up and put in the same amount of effort. What we want to do this time around is really create sustainability.

Fr. Andrew: I’ve seen, for instance, some colleges will have an amazing OCF and everyone talks about them and they’re known across their state or whatever—and then it just goes away, and it’s because the leaders graduated.

Ms. Wilkinson: Exactly.

Fr. Andrew: It is hard to create sustainable efforts like this. So then tell us about the story of the revival of OCLife. What happened?

Ms. Wilkinson: Well, I discovered Orthodox Christians for Life during college, and I was really excited at first. I just thought, “Oh, this is what I’ve been looking for!”—and then I realized that it was really just a website and there was just… It was kind of the remains of the organization, and it was totally inactive. So I made it my goal, kind of this long-term goal, to revive it unless someone beat me to it, which would have been great, but it never happened. So I just had this in mind that someday, in the future, when the time is right, I want to help revive this organization. This was driven in part by just this increasingly uncomfortable awareness that Orthodox Christians just seemed to be absent from the pro-life movement. As I became more involved, I felt more and more like I was sort of living this dual life, where I would have my pro-life world, doing all my activism and my events and my work, and then I would have my Orthodox world—and why weren’t they overlapping? It just felt very strange to me.

So after I moved to California, I was able to connect with some people that had a similar vision, and eventually we received a donation that was sort of seed money that helped us get off the ground and pushed us to start working toward non-profit status and laying out a vision, and last week we officially launched.

Fr. Andrew: Wow, last week! [Laughter]

Ms. Wilkinson: Yeah, last week, but this has been in the works for some time. Last week it’s official, it’s public: we’re launching. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Wow, okay, so what led up to last week? I mean, non-profit organizations don’t just spring up out of the ground. How long have you been actually working on this?

Ms. Wilkinson: Oh, goodness, how long? I would say a couple of years. We received non-profit status in 2019, but it takes a while to be ready. You have to redo the website and come up with what are your goals and start making connections.

Fr. Andrew: And it’s a really nice website. I’ll just mention it’s oclife.org, right?

Ms. Wilkinson: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: It looks great, lots of good info there. Okay, you mentioned that you felt like the Orthodox were kind of absent from the pro-life movement, at least visibly so. I mean, I’ve been to pro-life events and I’ve interacted a lot with one of the local crisis pregnancy centers, and if I had to describe the religious affiliation of most of the people I’ve ever interacted with in the movement is that they are almost all Roman Catholics.

Ms. Wilkinson: Right.

Fr. Andrew: There are some very committed Protestants there as well, but, boy, the Roman Catholic Church in the United States is just way out ahead for this particular work. It’s astounding how well-organized they are and how much support they have. Where does the Orthodox Church in the US stand right now in the larger pro-life movement?

Ms. Wilkinson: I would say, like you said, they are largely absent. Of course, certainly individuals here and there are involved, but there’s just no coordinated large-scale presence or engagement, and that’s really what Orthodox Christians for Life wants to improve. I think this is to the detriment not only of the pro-life movement, because I think the pro-life movement needs Orthodox involvement; I think we have something to offer, but also to the detriment of Orthodox Christianity, to our Church, and not only because I think we should be involved in what I would argue is one of the greatest human rights issues of our time, but also because of just the effect that lack of involvement has on the Church and the Orthodox community.

I think there are a few big ways… I was just kind of thinking, “What are we missing right now? What is lacking?” And I think there are three big things that I see. The first is just a lack of organization. The Catholics have, in every diocese, they have a pro-life office; they have a pro-life ministry. This is something I would love to see: a sanctity of life ministry in every diocese in the United States. This would be fantastic, because this leads to… Without that, we have a lack of education, we have a lack of maybe proper catechism, lack of organization, lack of resources. With these Catholic offices, they provide everything from educational curriculum to prayer resources to post-abortion healing ministries. I think until we have that, until we have pro-life ministries embedded into the structure of the Church, the structure of the jurisdictions, I hope that OCLife can fill that gap.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Lest people get too discouraged if we compare ourselves against the Catholics in this regard, one of the things I like to point out is that for every one Orthodox Christian in America, there are 67 Catholics.

Ms. Wilkinson: Exactly.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so we can’t just say, “Well, why do they have all this and we don’t?” The number-one reason is that there are way more of them than us, so we shouldn’t be surprised when they have way more resources at their disposal to do this kind of thing—but that doesn’t excuse us from not doing the thing that we can be doing. So, yes, as you were saying. I just wanted to add that in, in case people were like: Man! What is the deal? Why are the Catholics so far ahead? Well, they’re huge, and we’re not.

Ms. Wilkinson: And if we look at Orthodox countries, look at Russia or other places in Eastern Europe, you see the opposite situation. Orthodoxy is the religion of the land, and you see that the Church is just doing an incredible job. They’re opening dozens and dozens of pregnancy support centers and homes for unwed mothers and all of these things. So that’s kind of my inspiration; that’s the model that I would love to see here.

And speaking of that, that was kind of the second thing on my list, that right now we don’t really see Orthodox-led pregnancy resource centers, for example. I think supporting women who are [considering] abortion, and their children, this is a huge opportunity for ministry for Orthodox Christians. Pregnancy resource centers exist all over the country. They offer women free pregnancy tests and ultrasounds and diapers, baby items, maternity clothes, parenting classes, and on and on. But out of nearly 3,000 pregnancy centers, how many are Orthodox-run? Just a few. We have this wonderful ministry called Zoe for Life based in Ohio.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I’ve heard of that one.

Ms. Wilkinson: They have a pregnancy center, and they’ve been expanding to different cities, so I think they have a handful of locations now. This is so wonderful, and I would love to see Orthodox Christians all over the country starting a Zoe for Life center in their community. In every major Orthodox metro area, that would be wonderful, but now it’s a handful out of 3,000, and the rest are run by Protestants and Catholics, so I think that’s just another way that we have a ways to go.

Last of all, I would say, for our own sake, for our own community, something that we really lack is abortion healing resources that are directly intended for Orthodox Christians, because of course the sacrament of holy confession is the first and foremost way that an Orthodox Christian would seek healing from any sin, be it abortion or anything else, but I think the availability of post-abortion group counseling or post-abortion healing retreats, for example, can be just extremely helpful in other ways, with psychological recovery and with helping to process a traumatic event. These are the types of programs that are also offered all over the country by different groups, Catholic and Protestant.

But out of, last I heard, there were 200 different post-abortion healing programs, zero are Orthodox; we have nothing. This means Orthodox Christians have nowhere to turn for this type of in-depth healing that is grounded in the Orthodox faith and theological perspective. So these other programs, which are not Orthodox, are going to approach issues like sin, death, repentance from a different perspective, so they may incorporate scriptural interpretations or spiritual practices or theological elements which are not Orthodox. So an Orthodox Christian can participate and I think gain something valuable from these programs, but they’re going to need to be aware of that, that this is not necessarily the way that the Orthodox Church would look at this particular issue. This is just a huge, huge need, I think, in our community, for our own people.

The last thing I want to mention is what you mentioned earlier, Father, about Catholics sort of leading the charge when it comes to the pro-life movement. This is a massive opportunity for evangelism that we’re currently missing out on. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met who end up converting to Catholicism because they’re drawn to the Catholic Church’s strong pro-life stance. In fact, I can’t tell you how many national leaders and figureheads in the pro-life movement have converted to Catholicism for this reason. Of course, to the Catholic Church’s credit, it’s pretty amazing how many people they’re drawing in simply because they’re known for being pro-life.

But in my experience sometimes pro-life people who might actually otherwise be interested in Orthodoxy are sometimes skeptical about the Church because they just see a lack of involvement from the Orthodox Church on the pro-life front. Like you said, we’re a minority. Of course, that’s a fact, but we do have some work to do. I think that our Catholic brothers and sisters have set an amazing example for us to follow, and the sanctity of life cause has just become so defining for them. One of our long-term hopes for the organization is that it would become a means of evangelism for Orthodoxy, that if everywhere you look Orthodox parishes and Orthodox communities are committed to talking about this issue, to supporting pregnant women at risk for abortion, and to creating and promoting a culture of life, then people with strong pro-life convictions would be automatically drawn to Orthodoxy.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and also it’s just a reality that in the ancient Church many people were drawn into the Church precisely because they had been ministered to by Christians, that they experienced the love of God from these people who didn’t have to give it to them. In the ancient world there was no social net or anything like that. The Romans did not care if a non-Roman citizen died in the street, and, oh, by the way, that’s most of the people in the empire. They did not care. It was normal in the culture for people to take unwanted children and just drop them off in the wilderness to be eaten by wolves. That was normal. But Christians lived in a different way, and when they did that, then people noticed that. Not everybody’s going to, but people noticed that and said, “Wow. That’s love, and boy, do I want that.” Great point.

All right. So you’re preparing for 2021. You just got your full status last week, officially relaunched. You’re headed off into orbit. What does 2021 look like for OCLife? What are the first steps that you’re going to be taking?

Ms. Wilkinson: Our big goal for 2021 is to roll out our affiliation program and to begin supporting people to start pro-life ministries in their parishes. We hope to see this in every jurisdiction all over the country. These ministries will have a dual focus, the first focus being internal, so, supporting their parish and just kind of cultivating a pro-life ethic at their parish; then the second focus being external, which would be engaging the parish with pro-life efforts in their communities. I think it is important to remember that you have to take care of your own before you can go out and help others.

So I do want to see a big emphasis on parish ministries helping their own parish. But some of the goals that they will have will be, first of all, to just eliminate the risk of abortions being obtained in the parish. This is really a big deal, because what happens when someone becomes pregnant in a religious setting? Often there’s actually a greater temptation of abortion than in a secular setting, because someone might be so afraid of being judged and condemned that they actually try to hide the first sin of sex outside of marriage and end up committing a far worse sin of abortion. So how do we communicate to our parishes that, of course, we have these standards and expectations for sexuality as Orthodox Christians, but at the same time, for someone who makes a mistake, we are going to support them and love them, and we’re not going to condemn them, we’re not going to shun them. And we just want to make sure that people know that, so that there’s an awareness of that within parishes so that we don’t have this situation of Orthodox women and girls obtaining secret abortions, which I think is happening, and we just don’t know to what degree it’s happening.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, well, it is happening. I can say that it’s definitely happening. Yeah, I think that… Boy, you’ve hit upon, I think, a really important note, which is that sometimes when we become aware of the moral gravity of questions like this, the response of a committed Christian is sometimes one of anger and condemnation and rejection, because it’s just so horrifying. And especially if it’s someone you know or someone in your family, it becomes even more horrifying. “How could that possibly enter into my family? How could my kid do that?” Whatever. And we lose sight of the fact that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners. He looked upon our sinful state and said, “I’m going to die for you, and I’m going to make a way for salvation for you.” I think we need to be trained better in how to imitate him in that. So I love that you mentioned that. A lot of people’s understanding of what it means to be pro-life is that it’s about anger and judgment.

Ms. Wilkinson: Right. Not at all.

Fr. Andrew: All right. So what else? What else needs to happen in parishes that you’re going to be working on particularly in 2021?

Ms. Wilkinson: Helping to support clergy and seminarians on this issue. Again, it’s a difficult issue, and it’s understandable, I think, that many clergy feel unprepared to deal with it, or maybe they just avoid it altogether. But how can we change that? How can we equip seminarians so they feel prepared to deal with abortion, whether that entails a difficult pregnancy situation that could arise in their parish, or how to give support to post-abortive women, or how to answer hard questions about abortion: Do they feel just lost when it comes to all these arguments that are constantly thrown our way? We want to look into what are their needs and how can we support them, and we also want to start serving Orthodox clergy on this topic. We want to find out our priests’ current approach to the abortion issue and the attitude of their congregations, what resources they would find most helpful. It won’t be scientific, but we hope that with enough responses it will be able to provide valuable insight into the state of Orthodox parishes and how OCLife can best serve them.

Also, the parish ministry can help to provide education and awareness of issues especially among the youth. I think that it’s really important to be having these discussions with the youth group, with the young adult ministry, and ensuring that they know the Church’s stance, they understand the arguments for abortion and how they’re built on false premises, they know how to respond to them, they know where to go for help if anyone they know ever becomes pregnant. I think that’s super important, focusing on the youth.

And then, of course, engaging the parish in external pro-life efforts and charity work. How can the parish collaborate with other churches, with other local groups, toward the common goal of ending abortion and supporting women in their community? How can they support their local pregnancy resource center? What resources do those centers need that the parish can step in and provide, whether that’s perhaps a woman who has chosen life that the pregnancy center would like to find a group to throw her a baby shower; maybe the parish ministry can step up and do that. Things like that.

Fr. Andrew: It’s interesting to me that you mention especially talking to youth, because I’m Generation X; I’m in my mid-40s now. For a long time, my sense of where the country was headed in terms of the pro-life movement is that it was something that was dying and that each generation is becoming more and more in favor of abortion. I’ve read now a number of articles which really surprised me which said that Millennials are actually among the most pro-life generation currently alive, people who are now I guess mostly in their early 30s, roughly. How is that possible? It seemed like everything was just… It’s really funny, because often when you get this sort of culture war narrative, there’s a sense of continual decline and we’re just raging against the dying of the night. So what’s going on? What happened?

Ms. Wilkinson: Well, when I worked for Students for Life of America, our slogan was, “We’re the Pro-Life Generation.” I think that it is true. I think that, not to say it’s not becoming more and more divided and more polarized, I think that pro-life young people are becoming more pro-life, and then on the other side people who are pro-choice are becoming kind of extreme in their beliefs, so you see this deepening divide. But I think the reasons—at least, this is my own personal opinion—I think that one reason that young people are more pro-life is they’ve seen the devastation of abortion. They have mothers, aunts, maybe friends who have had abortions, so they’re missing siblings… Plus, we have ultrasound technology that just makes it undeniable that the life in the womb is a baby, a developing baby. I think young people have just seen enough of what abortion has done to the culture that they are able to reject it. This doesn’t mean that they maybe have other morally conservative views or Christian views or anything, but they are able to recognize how abortion has affected their own personal lives and then internalized that as a belief.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean we’ve been living with it now as a viable option for most people in America for 50 years, which is just hard to even imagine that now, now a couple of whole generations raised with this in our culture. Yes, so I mean most Americans probably see the pro-life movement as mainly political. That’s what gets the news; that’s what shows up on TV. In the revived OCLife, is that going to be an emphasis? Are you going to be engaged in the political realm?

Ms. Wilkinson: Well, as a non-profit organization, we’re not permitted to be politically involved, so that really won’t be OCLife’s emphasis, though I certainly think that is important to some degree. But I guess my thoughts on that are I think it’s a real tragedy that abortion has become this political issue. It’s so politicized, and I think that really it should be crossing political divides. I think it should be a human rights issue. I remember once hearing someone say that abortion will end on the day that Democrats and Republicans are competing to be the most pro-life party, and I thought, “Man, that is so true! Wouldn’t I love to see the day!” [Laughter] But I think it’s just a big mistake to get so wrapped up in the political fights that are raging all around us that you forget that there’s a very real fight taking place in your town, that babies are being killed, in your town, down your street. They’re being ripped into pieces or poisoned, and hundreds of women every day are making a choice that will probably haunt them for the rest of their lives. How can you change the culture in your town? How can you help end abortion in your own community? Politics is downstream from culture, so if you try to change laws without changing culture, you’re going to have a real hard time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I’ve also heard it: Culture is downstream of spiritual life.

Ms. Wilkinson: Oh, there you go. Exactly. No kidding.

Fr. Andrew: Right? Okay, we’re talking about the culture. Given the increasing drop off in religious affiliation in America—it seems to go down every year now—should we be making a theological case against abortion? I mean, is that going to work?

Ms. Wilkinson: Um, I think what I’m interested in is being effective, so when it comes to any pro-life tactic or approach, the first question I have is: Is this effective? Is it accomplishing the goal that it seeks to accomplish? And so: Is making a theological case going to be effective outside of a religious context? I don’t think so, because, I mean, a lot of people who do believe in God aren’t particularly interested in what he has to say—

Fr. Andrew: Yep.

Ms. Wilkinson: —much less people who don’t believe in him. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Ms. Wilkinson: So I think that we can use secular arguments that appeal to people’s moral intuitions, and science and philosophy support the position against abortion. What religion does is it tells us why human beings are valuable. It gives us the proper anthropology, and it tells us whether our actions are moral or immoral. So I don’t think it’s particularly useful to bring in religion or theology unless I’m speaking with an Orthodox person or a Christian person who cares what the Church teaches, or maybe if it’s a conversation that sort of becomes about whether human beings have any worth at all, or whether morality exists. Then you need to deal with the bigger issue. You need to stop talking about abortion and deal with the bigger issue.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. You mentioned that the debate over it has become so polarized, and one of the things you said was that especially the pro-abortion position is getting even more extreme. Now there’s even movements to “celebrate your abortion, shout your abortion.” I see this, and it’s utterly horrifying. It’s utterly horrifying. And alongside that, just sort of cheerleading, there are sort of arguments being made. We could list off a bunch of them, but how can we respond? When someone puts forth an argument for abortion, how do we respond to that?

Ms. Wilkinson: Well, I think that arguments on both sides of the debate often descend into ad hominem attacks: “You don’t care about women!” “You don’t care about babies!” Or straw-manning each other’s positions—and this happens from both sides. It’s not just the pro-choice side; it’s certainly the pro-life side as well. So I have a few suggestions.

I think one is to try to discern what the person’s argument really is at its core, and address that. For example, if someone says, “Well, abortion is okay because it’s not a human,” do they mean… Are they talking about biological human life, or are they talking about something more philosophical, like when human life becomes valuable—“It’s not a person”? A lot of times we see people interchanging the words “human” and “person,” and we need to kind of distinguish between those, that one is a scientific term and one is more of a philosophical term. Well, even if people say, “No one knows when life begins,” they might not actually mean, “No one knows when biological life begins.” They might actually be talking about, again, “No one knows when life becomes valuable, when an embryo or fetus becomes the same as you or me.”

Even the slogan, “My body, my choice”: what are they really saying there? They’re not talking about the baby’s body. They’re talking about their own body; they’re talking about bodily autonomy. That’s a huge topic. I don’t think we can get into it right now, but I think bodily autonomy arguments are the direction that the pro-choice movement and mindset has kind of gone. It’s really a waste of time, I think, for pro-lifers to keep hammering down “Life begins at conception” and that we just need to talk about the humanity of the fetus—because, really, people who are pro-choice, many of them know that. They don’t care. That’s not the point. The point for them is that you have two competing sets of rights. You have the woman, the woman’s rights, and you have literally a body inside of another body, so you have these two competing rights, and in their view the woman’s rights trump the baby’s rights. How do we really deal with the bodily rights issue? It’s not effective to keep saying, “It’s a baby. It’s a baby.” They don’t care it’s a baby. They know that.

I think just really discerning what are the arguments, how can we address the root concern, and then to be effective, lay your argument out in the open. Just state your position. Don’t try to sort of bounce around, trying to hide behind different things or play “gotcha!” in an argument about abortion, a debate about abortion. Come out and state what you believe. “I have this really weird view, that I believe that all human beings are morally valuable and they have this equal right to life, and an embryo is a human being; therefore I believe it’s morally wrong to kill an embryo through abortion. I believe that an embryo is morally equivalent to a full-grown born person.” And then you can actually have a real conversation. A lot of these other things that we hear about are just sort of distractions, so we need to focus on where is the central disagreement.

I think another helpful thing that pro-lifers can do is try to avoid having something that my dear friends at the Equal Rights Institute, which is a pro-life apologetics training organization, something they call “fetus tunnel vision,” where you can’t see any injustice other than abortion. [Laughter] I feel that I can speak about this, because I certainly suffered from this condition for many years, and it’s something I think very common for pro-life advocates and maybe other types of movements and advocacy as well. You can just… It’s easy to become so overwhelmed with the injustice of abortion that you can’t really recognize other tragedies. So you’re always making comparisons. “This tragedy only killed twelve people, and meanwhile there’s this many hundreds of babies killed every day by abortion.” When you do that, what’s happening for the other person in the other person’s mind is they’re thinking, “Wow. Her moral compass is broken.” I mean, how can they take anything you say seriously if they think that you can’t recognize any other tragedy or injustice that exists. I think it’s really important that, yes, abortion is obviously just in terms of the sheer number and the impact it’s had in our entire culture, it is I would say one of if not the biggest injustice of our time, but we can’t forget that there are others, that there are other types of tragedy, and we have to recognize those and show that we have an intact moral compass, and we can have compassion for people other than babies and fetuses.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Ms. Wilkinson: And related to that, if we’re having a debate about abortion, discussion about abortion, we need to show that we care about the other person more than the argument, because, again, how can someone take you seriously? You’re trying to convince them of the dignity of human embryos, which is just not as obvious as the full-grown human being in front of you. So if they don’t feel that you’re treating them with dignity, it’s going to be very difficult for them to take you seriously.

So those are some main things. Other things would be: just try not to have arguments online. It’s almost never effective! Try to have a real dialogue in person with someone. Invite them to coffee to have a discussion. Always keep in mind that if you’re talking to someone that’s post-abortive, always keep that in mind in how you communicate. I think those can help us be more effective.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. You mentioned this sort of tunnel vision where people don’t… They just can’t even think about other kinds of tragedy and abuse and so forth. One of the classic examples of that is that people say, “Well, look, abortion needs to be legal because people get raped and sometimes they get pregnant, or there’s incest and sometimes they get pregnant. Or a woman might die if she has a baby or be permanently damaged.” It seems to me that a lot of the times… Philosophically, I can say, “Why should you kill another human being because this other thing happened?” Which, I mean, I agree that this a true thing to say, but it doesn’t tend to address this other harm that’s actually occurred. Yeah, I don’t know. Did you have anything else that you wanted to add about that in particular?

Ms. Wilkinson: Well, speaking specifically about the case of rape or incest, I think that this certainly is a situation that even many people who are generally pro-life really struggle with, because people are concerned about the well-being of women in difficult circumstances, and this is a common concern and very understandable.

It’s a very tragic and sensitive topic, and we have to remember that women who have become pregnant from rape deserve our most care and compassion, and we, especially as pro-life people, cannot minimize the difficulty and pain of their situation; we have to recognize that. Not only have they been violated in one of the most reprehensible and evil ways possible, but the occurrence of pregnancy I think can really add to their shock and devastation. So they’re faced with a really difficult choice. Either they can carry this surprise pregnancy to term, disrupting their plans, possibly going through a difficult labor, a painful delivery; obviously the child was not conceived in love. Or she can turn around and pay a doctor to kill her baby. So in that situation, I want to do everything possible to help her and support her, everything we can possibly do—except kill someone.

That’s where I think that our compassion is misplaced if we advocate for abortion as a solution, because abortion turns the victim into an aggressor. It adds more destruction to an already devastating situation. It makes this false promise that it’s going to bring resolution to the woman who’s been raped, but in reality it’s not going to erase what happened to her. It’s not going to minimize what happened to her. It’s not going to help her to heal. It’s going to layer on more pain, more abuse. After a rape survivor has experienced an invasive and violent attack, now you’re putting her through an invasive and violent procedure. I think that’s just insensitive and kind of short-sighted. Obviously, everyone’s situation isn’t the same, but many women who have undergone an abortion after being raped speak about how it further traumatized them, and they kind of draw these parallels between the PTSD symptoms that they experienced after their rape and after their abortion.

You also hear amazing stories, conversely, about women who choose life for their children conceived in rape, and they feel that rejecting the opportunity to inflict further violence actually helped them to rise above their circumstances and helped them to heal. So of course, like you said, even if abortion does seem like the best option for a pregnant rape survivor, it is still wrong for the same reason that rape is wrong: it’s an act of violence against another human being. But I do think that, as pro-life people, it’s important for us to keep in mind the gravity of those situations, certainly.

Fr. Andrew: So there was a 2014 Pew Forum survey of religious people in America, and they included Orthodox Christians. And they found actually in the survey that 53% of Orthodox Christians that they surveyed said that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Now, mind you, it’s a small sample, so there’s a pretty big margin of error, +/-12% according to the survey, but still, even if you shrink it down to the smallest possible level of 39%, it seems like a huge chunk, or maybe half, or maybe more than half of Orthodox Christians in America think that abortion is basically okay. I mean, what are we to make about this? Have we failed to catechize our parishioners on life issues? Is there ambiguity in the Church’s teaching or history about abortion? I mean, is it…? I’ve known Orthodox Christians who say, “Well, this is just a matter of opinion. You can still be a good Orthodox Christian and be fine with abortion, even if you just might say, well, I’m personally opposed to it, but I think that other people should be allowed.” What are we to make of this? This is so strange to me.

Ms. Wilkinson: I agree with you, Father. I don’t really know what to make of it. I think there isn’t any nuance in that statistic accounting for how many people of those interviewed were practicing Orthodox Christians as opposed to those who just self-identify as Orthodox from an ethnic background, and maybe they’ve never been to church? That’s unclear, and I wish there was more information there. But, yeah, I think there seems to be this disconnect from what the Orthodox Church has always taught and what many Orthodox people believe and practice, and I do think that maybe to some degree it must be a failure of catechism. I’m not really sure. I hope that OCLife can help to change that statistic for the next Pew Religious Landscape study.

But I don’t think that there’s any ambiguity in the Church’s teaching. It’s very clear from the beginning of the Church, both in dogma and in practice, that abortion was never allowed; it’s always been prohibited. We see prohibitions in the Didache, in the teachings of the Church Fathers and in the early councils, and of course the early Christians would rescue children that would be left to die of exposure, which was a common practice at the time, and still is in some parts of the world. But according to some people, kind of like you mentioned at the beginning, Father, the founding of orphanages and hospitals was a major contributor to the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire. And that makes sense, because of course if you take care of the outcast children, they’re going to grow up Christian, but people saw that and [decided that is something] I want to believe in.

So abortion is not a new issue for the Church. I would say our pro-life ethic is really a core part of our history and our identity as Christians. Can an individual believe that it’s okay and be an Orthodox Christians? I guess all I would say—I mean, certainly it happens—I would say we’re all broken, we’re all diseased, and the Church is a hospital. Many people come to the Church and are raised in the Church with all sorts of false beliefs about anything and everything, and depending on a person’s level of commitment to that false belief, I think that certainly can be an impediment to their salvation. I don’t think that an acceptance of abortion is compatible with Orthodoxy, but for those who are struggling with accepting the Church’s teaching, I hope that OCLife will be able to offer clarity and be a resource.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Okay, I just recently, as I was preparing for this interview, came across an article. This is some of the stuff we need to learn to talk about better, I think. But I came across an article about a successfully born baby girl who was frozen when she was an embryo in October of 1997. If she had been born nine months after she was originally frozen, she’d be in her early 20s now. But she was thawed out earlier this year and then she was born finally just in October of this year.

What are we supposed to make of this? On the one hand, it’s awesome that this embryo survived and now is a born baby girl—yay, life, right? But is this ethical? How do we look at this kind of thing from the point of view of being pro-life Christians? which of course for me is a redundant phrase.

Ms. Wilkinson: I mean, my own thoughts are I think we can hold two positions in tension, that every single human life conceived is made in the image of God and intrinsically valuable, and at the same time that is just really unfortunate, because it is unfair for us to treat children as commodities, and this is what’s happening there. This happens in a lot of different ways these days, just with all of the different reproductive technology available now, and it’s happening more and more. But that’s what it’s doing: it’s treating a child as a commodity, and children deserve better than that. So I think it’s really not fair to them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah. So, okay, let’s say you get your way. You get all your dreams, your vision for what OCLife is going to be again, and there’s a parish that’s been sort of saturated with the work that you want to do. What would this ideal parish look like in terms of the mission of your organization? What is that parish doing?

Ms. Wilkinson: Some of the things we talked about before for the goals of the parish ministries, but the first thing they’re doing is just ensuring, maybe through a discussion with the youth group, maybe just a mention in a homily once a year, but however they feel is best, just periodically assuring the parish, letting them know that if anyone should ever become pregnant outside of wedlock, the parish is going to support her: they’re not going to shun her, they’re not going to throw her out, regardless of circumstances. That’s the first thing that they’re doing, and that’s really my biggest concern, I think.

The second thing they’re doing is they’re incorporating some sort of prayer for an end to abortion into the regular life of the parish community. Maybe that’s adding pro-life petitions into the liturgy, maybe that’s praying a moleben for an end to abortion throughout the year or even once a year, maybe that’s participating in “40 Days for Life” prayer vigils at their local abortion facility, but praying for an end to abortion, keeping that at the front.

And the next thing they’re doing is they’re having regular dialogue with the youth and with the young adults, again, about human dignity, about abortion, about these difficult issues. They are incorporating that into maybe the Sunday school curriculum or the youth group. Maybe they’re hosting a pro-life movie night with a discussion, something fun like that, but they’re ensuring that the youth and young adults who are the most affected by this issue and the most targeted by the abortion industry, ensuring that they know: they know about the issue.

And they’re also formulating a close relationship with their local pregnancy center. They’re finding out, again, how they need support, how they can best serve them. They’re ensuring that the parish knows about the pregnancy center, maybe posting a flyer for their services on the bulletin board, maybe inviting someone to speak during coffee hour, but just ensuring that everyone knows about the resources: how to support them, how to take advantage of their services if needed, just really developing that. Because our pregnancy centers, despite how many there are around the country, many of them are struggling, and I think every Orthodox parish needs to really step up and commit to supporting their local center.

So those are kind of the main things: supporting their parish from the inside and their community from the outside.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So, all right. God willing, we’ve had a bunch of listeners who’ve listened to this whole conversation, and they’re as enthusiastic as I am about the revival of OCLife, and they want to help. They’ve heard what you said; they want to help. So how can they support you? Where can they learn more? How can they get involved? And also, I know you’re fundraising for the end of the year. How can they give you that material support that you guys need?

Ms. Wilkinson: Thank you, Father. Well, yes, we are doing a big fundraising push right now until the end of the year. We’d like to raise $30,000 by the end of December, just to kind of get off the ground and ensure that we are going to be a financially stable organization. You can learn more at our website. That’s OCLife.org. That’s kind of where our little tagline came from. You can also visit our Facebook page, follow us there, get updates. Currently we have a Giving Tuesday fundraiser through Facebook, so you can give directly through Facebook, and actually there’s a big advantage to that, which is that Facebook doesn’t take a cut of donations. Normal donation processing software takes 2-3%, whatever it may be. Ours does; everyone’s does. But if you donate through Facebook, they will send us a check within a couple months for that full amount. So that’s super wonderful.

So, yeah, financial support is really the big thing we need right now. But also, if you’re interested in starting a parish ministry at your church, getting involved, and you’d like to find out more about that, please get in touch with us. You can email us at info@oclife.org and we’ll be accepting applications for the ministry program very soon, hopefully sometime December or January, and then we’ll be able to get that rolling. We would love to see… We’ve had a lot of interest already so far, so please get in touch with us.

Fr. Andrew: Great!

Ms. Wilkinson: And, again, this is something that because it’s not embedded into the structure of the Church, we need people to reach out, because this is not something like a lot of other ministries that’s sort of mandatory; it’s part of the parish structure, whether it’s Philoptochos or Teen SOYO or different ladies’ ministries in different parishes. A lot of those things are just part and parcel of starting a parish: you get to start one of these ministries. But for Orthodox Christians for Life, it’s going to be people that want to engage reaching out and working with us that way.

Fr. Andrew: Very good. Well, Emily, thank you so much for coming on the Orthodox Engagement podcast. I have very much appreciated your time, and I wish you well in everything that’s coming.

Ms. Wilkinson: Thank you so much, Father.

Fr. Andrew: I have been speaking with Emily Wilkinson. She is the new president and executive director of Orthodox Christians for Life, which is reviving now after 20 years of dormancy. To learn more and especially to support OCLife, point your web browser to oclife.org. Thank you for listening, and we will connect with you next time.