After campus success, pro-life leader trains others to dismantle pro-choice arguments

In 2016, students at St. Olaf College in Northfield loudly protested as people arrived for a fundraising banquet for the Northfield Women’s Center, a pro-life pregnancy resource center, which was holding its event on St. Olaf’s campus.  

It was the year before Emily Albrecht enrolled at the school to study vocal music education, but the incident would deeply shape her college experience.  

Albrecht, 23, is a speaker, writer and coach with the Equal Rights Institute, a secular pro-life organization that trains pro-life advocates to dialogue with pro-choice advocates. She is presenting “Equipped for Life: A Fresh Approach to Conversations About Abortion” Oct. 1 at Lumen Christi in St. Paul to prepare attendees for confident conversations about abortion.  

Before college, pro-life activism wasn’t on Albrecht’s radar. Her Catholic high school had a pro-life club, but the Oshkosh, Wisconsin, native wasn’t a member. “I was pro-life because that’s what my parents told me to be, and that’s what the Church told me to be,” she said. “So, when I got to college, I had zero plans to get involved.” 

It was Albrecht’s roommate Meredith Maloley — now client services director at Northfield Women’s Center — who encouraged her to join the college’s pro-life club, Oles for Life. Members were painfully aware of campus animosity toward the pro-life movement, which was on full display at the Northfield Women’s Center banquet protest.  

“(Students) managed to organize themselves and line the hallways of the student union with signs, screaming at the mostly elderly members of the community that had come to support the pregnancy resource center. That is what the St. Olaf campus was like when I got there,” Albrecht said. In that environment, she didn’t want to tell anyone she was pro-life, but acquiesced with Maloley’s persistence. 

However, “every single thing we tried failed epically,” she said. Club members spent hours putting up a pro-life display with information they thought would appeal to students’ interest in equality, and it was torn down 13 times in a single week.  

At the end of her freshman year, Albrecht became co-president of the club, which had only four members from a student body of 3,000. They knew they needed a new game plan and discovered the Equal Rights Institute. They all enrolled in its online Equipped for Life course.  

“We figured out in about the first two seconds that it was the gamechanger that we were looking for,” Albrecht said. By the fall of 2019, “our very tiny club was now completely trained through ERI on how to talk to pro-choice people, how to understand their arguments, how to respond to them, how to create dialogue.” 

They set up a table in the student union with a poll: Should abortion remain legal in the United States? “People would come up and voice their opinion on that … and we would engage in conversations with hundreds of students,” Albrecht said. “We did this constantly for three straight years … and if we fast-forward to three years later, everything about my campus had changed.” 

The club witnessed an attitude shift on campus toward pro-life advocates, Albrecht said.  

“I cannot tell you how many conversations I had at that table that ended with the pro-choice person saying to me something like, ‘I don’t know what to think right now. I need to take some time to process this, but I just want you to know that I really respect your club,’” she said. “We were taken seriously because even if people didn’t agree with our stance, they respected us because they genuinely had never seen pro-life people be genuine and loving, and at the same time, be able to engage with good arguments, be able to have these conversations and be respectful.” 

During Albrecht’s senior year in 2021, the Northfield Women’s Center fundraising banquet returned to campus — and no students protested, she said. 

A parishioner of St. Agnes in St. Paul, Albrecht has worked for ERI since 2020, and she’s one of its most recognizable faces. She appears on ERI’s social media including YouTube, Facebook Reels and TikTok, and she co-hosts its podcast “Equipped for Life” with Josh Brahm, president of the North Carolina-based organization. She cheekily describes her work as “(helping) pro-life people to be less weird.”  

“In other words, what I’m trying to do is help pro-life advocates to make more good arguments and fewer bad ones, and I try to help us connect relationally with people who are different from us so that we can actually engage with their ideas,” she said. 

Albrecht said ERI has seen an uptick in speaker requests due to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which returned abortion policy-making to the states.  

For a pro-life person, “Your No. 1 goal is to show pro-choice people that you are not what they thought,” she said. “These stereotypes are abounding right now, and pro-life people are feeling scared and betrayed. And I think that pro-life people have this incredible opportunity and even a little bit of an obligation to stand up to that, to demonstrate who we are.”

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HOW TO TALK ABOUT ABORTION 

– “Equipped for Life: A Fresh Approach to Conversations About Abortion” 

– 9 a.m.–4 p.m. at Lumen Christi, 2055 Bohland Ave., St. Paul 

– $15 half day, $20 full day.  

– Emily Albrecht of the Equal Rights Institute will share a tested set of practical tools to use in conversations about abortion. Participants will practice conversations with pro-life advocates who defend abortion with arguments based on difficult circumstances, biology, personhood and bodily autonomy. 

– Sponsored by the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis and the Minnesota Catholic Conference 

– Register at archspm.org/events.