At Equal Rights Institute, we believe that how we pursue the pro-life mission matters just as much as what we believe.
We are committed to equipping people to engage difficult conversations with clarity and honesty while treating every person with compassion, dignity, and respect. Our mission, vision, and values shape everything we do. They guide how we create our content, train advocates, engage with people who disagree with us, and pursue a culture where truth and genuine dialogue can thrive.
Mission
Equipping everyday people to have smarter, kinder conversations
that transform culture and save unborn lives.
For a lot of people who oppose abortion, the last several years have been really discouraging. There are more abortions than ever, abortion conversations are more divisive than ever, and some of the loudest voices calling themselves pro-life are pretty ugly and have done real damage to the movement’s credibility. Some people wonder whether their side’s own methods have made things worse instead of better, and have given up on working toward a more life-affirming culture at all. Others keep trying, but feel like they’re banging their heads against a wall, no one is listening, and the needle isn’t moving. Sometimes it seems like there’s no principled way to make real progress changing hearts and minds about abortion. But there is. At ERI, we’ve seen our fresh approach work over and over again, in thousands of conversations. We’ve seen genuine mutual respect and understanding form between pro-life and pro-choice people, we’ve seen people’s perspectives start to shift, and we’ve seen pro-choice people fully change their minds. We’re on a mission to equip people like you to cultivate the same kind of loving, culture-transforming conversations.
Vision
While our mission statement summarizes why ERI exists, our vision is a list of specific things that we intentionally set out to do to fulfill our mission. It’s not an exhaustive list of everything that we are ever willing to do. But it is a fairly complete list of what we’re trying to do as of right now, and we aren’t going to add to it until we have the staff and resources to accomplish more things while not letting these things fail.
Here is the vision of Equal Rights Institute:
- We seek to be respected for the quality of both our content and our character.
- We create high-quality content based on specialized knowledge, extensive experience, and unique research and development. Our materials are designed to be accessible to the broadest possible section of the pro-life movement (both religious and secular), as well as to people who do not identify with the pro-life movement.
- We prepare pro-life individuals to speak meaningfully and productively about abortion with those who disagree.
- We equip groups to inspire top-down change on the national, state, and local levels with our content and through consultation work.
- We model how to treat people who disagree with us or who are considering abortion.
- We provide a healthy company atmosphere and prioritize work-life balance.
- We leverage social media and technology to expand our reach so the greatest number of people can benefit from our materials. We grow our company and individual platforms to engage positively with followers, critics, and influencers.
- We endeavor to mobilize the church to decrease the frequency and impact of abortion.
Core Values
- Integrity: We act truthfully and honorably, both in public and private. We speak with transparency to our audience, donors, and staff.
- Humility: We recognize that there is always more to learn, so we foster openness to new ideas and have a desire to learn from past experience, each other, and people who have different perspectives.
- Innovation: We are unconstrained by the way things have been done before. We are continuously researching, testing, and iterating to determine what dialogue techniques and arguments are the most persuasive in today’s cultural landscape.
- Excellence: Whatever we do, we will do well, delivering exceptional value to those we serve.
- Humor: We believe laughter is a gift that enriches the human experience and helps to create an instant connection between people of different walks of life, which is why we have chosen to incorporate it into our content and work environment. While we take our work very seriously, we try to not take ourselves too seriously.
- Prudence: We make decisions carefully after evaluating how our choices will affect the future of the organization and the broader pro-life movement.
Strategy
Speaking
We engage in platform speaking events across the country to spread practical dialogue tips, rigorous philosophy, and relational apologetics. These include speaking events at universities, conferences, churches, and pregnancy center banquets, as well as 1-2 day seminars. As of July 2026, we have spoken to 41,660 people at 357 speeches and 44 seminars in four countries and 28 states since ERI began in 2014!
Online Courses
We published the Equipped for Life Course on practical dialogue tips and apologetics in 2016, the Sidewalk Counseling Masterclass in 2019, and Equipped for Life Academy: Catholic Edition and Equipped for Life Academy: Protestant Edition in 2024. The Equipped for Life Course is our flagship training course for adults, while Equipped for Life Academy is tailored to high schools and church youth groups.
Outreach
ERI staff engage in campus outreaches, often in partnership with ERI Affiliate Groups or other organizations who have invited us to speak. Campus outreaches are one valuable way to make sure that we actually understand what pro-choice people are thinking and feeling. We believe that understanding is key to meaningful dialogue, and we don’t want people to have conversations where they’re just talking past each other.
YouTube
We create high-quality and free video content for everyday people that takes the toughest questions in the abortion debate head-on, with the clarity and charity our polarized culture desperately needs. From one-minute responses to analysis of current events to philosophy deep dives, our videos give you the tools to communicate respectfully and persuasively no matter who you’re talking to.
Writing
We regularly publish articles on practical dialogue tips, relational apologetics, pro-life apologetics/philosophy, and current events. Many of our students first engage with our content by finding one of our articles online!
Podcast
Emerging demographics are engaging with podcasts, including long-form podcasts, more than reading articles. We’re meeting them where they’re at by publishing discussions, interviews, and answers to listener questions through our Equipped for Life Podcast.
Affiliate Groups
ERI Affiliate Groups are pro-life groups of all sizes and types who come together around ERI’s unique approach and apologetics materials so they can maximize their effectiveness in pro-life advocacy.
FAQ’s
How would you summarize the problem or need your organization is working to address?
Pro-life advocates are often unpersuasive due to mediocre dialogue skills and an insufficient understanding of the way pro-choice people think about abortion. As a result, individual conversations about abortion are often off-putting and unconvincing. Meanwhile, the pro-choice movement is able to influence young people to sympathize with their position unopposed by any articulate opposing argument.
The political climate is incredibly divided and tribalistic. There has been a cultural shift of political discourse from face-to-face conversations to anonymous debates online. This lack of human connection and stimulating articulate discourse has created a need for civil conversation which is authentic and productive.
What is your organization aiming to accomplish?
- Train pro-life advocates in dialogue skills, greatly improving their ability to communicate with pro-choice people in a clear, relational manner.
- Train pro-life advocates to navigate the complex political territory of issues surrounding abortion so that dialogues can be productive even if they are between people with incredibly different worldviews.
- Train pro-life advocates to identify hidden premises in pro-choice rhetoric and thinking so that they can bring clarity to the conversation, find genuine common ground, and bring down walls which are preventing the other person from hearing the pro-life message.
- Train pro-life advocates to understand the strongest pro-choice philosophical arguments as well as the most persuasive counter-arguments.
- Train pro-life advocates to cultivate relationships with people who have different beliefs, for the sake of genuine friendship and for discovering truth together.
- Train pro-life advocates in the most effective sidewalk counseling techniques, so they can save more lives and help more families outside of abortion facilities.
What are your organization’s capabilities for accomplishing your strategy?
- We have invested in many outreaches on college campuses for our staff to collectively have thousands of conversations with pro-choice students so we can better understand how they think about abortion, which pro-life arguments they find convincing, and which barriers they have to becoming pro-life. Throughout this experience we have seen many minds change, shaped our philosophical content to register with the psychological perspective of pregnancy in our culture, and developed persuasive dialogue strategies.
- Our staff share an ethos which prioritizes understanding pro-choice culture, worldview, and rhetoric so that we can understand the real reasons why people disagree with the pro-life position, rather than assuming why they have come to believe what they do. This approach helps us to analyze our training content through a robust, critical lens from the opposing viewpoint.
How will your organization know if you are making progress?
- Our enrolled online course members are surveyed both before and after they view our content. We measure factors such as how often they participate in sidewalk counseling and ask whether or not they intend to participate more frequently after completing our training.
- In our post-course survey for the Equipped for Life course, 88.7% of members reported that ERI training accounts for half or more of their overall growth as a pro-life advocate.
- We track our analytics across social media platforms, subscribers to our content, video views, and podcast downloads. We anticipate growth and if we do not see consistent growth, we adjust our methods accordingly according to marketing research. For example, we post on social media during the optimal time of day and highest user frequency day of the week to have the maximum impact on our followers.
Are You Hiring?
We are careful to not grow our staff faster than we can manage. Having said that, we do have positions we’d love to see filled. Learn more about them here.
Does ERI use graphic abortion images?
We rarely talk publicly about the topic of abortion images. This isn’t because we don’t have opinions; it’s because there is almost no other topic that is as effective at dividing well-intentioned pro-life advocates.
We do use them in our outreach brochure, but we only use them with the person’s consent. You can read more about why we use images this way in our article, Abortion Images: A Case for Disagreement without Division. We hope it helps you understand where we’re coming from, while also showing that we have a lot of respect for our friends and colleagues who use images differently than we do.