Seth & Aubrie Drayer

“When you said you were going to show the video of aborted babies, I was surprised. But I felt I needed to look—to know once and for all what I did.” Aubrie, the kids, and I had just finished a jaunt to Scranton, PA—where I had been invited to deliver the keynote speech at the annual prayer breakfast hosted by Pennsylvanians for Human Life —when I had received a call from Andrea, who was present at the event. Andrea told me about her abortion 30 years prior. She said in mid-2018 she had finally begun to pursue healing and that the prayer breakfast was the first major pro-life event she had ever attended. When, in the middle of my presentation, I transitioned to the video of abortion victims, Andrea became uncertain of whether she wanted to watch. But by the time I finished prefacing the disturbing video with the beauty of the Gospel—explaining God does not merely overlook sin but that His Son became our sin—she had made her decision. “I felt I needed to look,” Andrea told...

“I had an abortion a year and a half ago.” “How are you doing now?” I asked “Julie,” who’d approached our display at Columbus State Community College. “Every day is like hell.” Over the past seven years, we’ve had countless conversations with women and men who, like Julie, find themselves oddly placed in our culture. They hear pro-abortion propaganda seeking to make abortion seem normal, commonplace, even good (e.g., 1in3campaign.org), but this rings false in light of guilt, sadness many feel within. While emotions can already be difficult to sort through, how much more complicated must it be when your society tells you those feelings are illegitimate—that you should only feel good about what you did? Julie told me she knows now that she killed her child. I acknowledged this reality, but then presented her with the good news that God forgives those who believe in His Son. In response, Julie said she is not convinced God exists. Instead of starting with evidence for G...

“If you have any scientific questions about this, please ask me!” While I was holding a microphone and had been taking questions from the crowd of students spread across the commons at University of Akron, I was not the one who had made this appeal. Rather, it had been a pink-clad woman proudly bearing the vest of a “clinic escort”—signifying that she works outside abortion facilities to quickly escort women past pro-life men and women offering counsel on the sidewalks. When no student responded, I raised my microphone and said, “I have a question.” Madonna, the clinic escort, turned to me expectantly. “What is a zygote inside a mother?” She replied, “A one-celled embryo.” When I pressed her to tell me what kind of one-celled being, she asked what kind of being the mother was. Even after I clarified that I was talking about humans—which I thought had been implicit—she continued to dance around the simple truths of embryology. Nevertheless, her clarifying question provide...

Dunkirk , a newly released WWII film, opens with 400,000 Allied soldiers stranded on a beach—beyond the saving reach of British destroyer vessels because of shallow waters—with the enemy strangling from all sides. The film details the soldiers’ struggle for survival, but in a pivotal scene, the true story takes a sharp turn as hundreds of unexpected ships appear on the horizon. Surprised, the navy commander responsible for the painstakingly slow shuttling of soldiers off of the beach raises binoculars. What he sees is one of the most remarkable rescue efforts of the 20th century. In this hour of great need, a call had gone out for ships without the depth restrictions of the destroyers. In response, about 850 private boats sailed across the Channel from England to France to bring their boys home. As my colleagues and I watched the film together, I was transfixed by this scene portraying the “little ships of Dunkirk.” Entering the war zone on these boats, putting their lives a...

If you were to stumble into the Created Equal training center this summer, you would find an interesting sight: an Ivy League graduate seated next to a high school senior, a vegan student enjoying a salad next to another savoring a hamburger, and hands shooting into the air or sudden applause as all passionately defend their position on a range of philosophical matters. This eclectic scene is Created Equal’s internship. At the beginning of the summer, our latest band of interns arrived with the usual awkwardness felt at the beginning of a school term. But what has united them over the past couple of months is far greater than the happenstance of selecting the same college course. Indeed it is deeper than shared conviction. Over the past two months, they’ve celebrated victories both intimate and public—from hearing a mother outside Planned Parenthood say she has changed her mind to watching the Ohio Senate pass the Dismemberment Abortion Ban. They’ve grappled in our classroom...

“This is fifty-five years old talking how the Lord kept me when I didn’t want to keep myself . . . I’m a hallelujah chick, and I ain’t ashamed of that.” The only evidence that Lucy, the woman sharing this spoken word poetry on the street of Cleveland, OH, was telling the truth about her age was a dusting of gray in her hair. Her tone was bright, her words infused with passion, and—perhaps most surprisingly—her laugh carried not a note of irony or exhaustion in spite of a story marked by pain. I encountered Lucy while on a mission to encourage the Justice Riders . It was the middle of the week, when the hours start to drag and conversations trend toward stale soundbites. The last Rider I planned to check in on was Megan Smith, a veteran Rider who’s also been an intern on our team. Approaching Megan, I saw her in earnest conversation. When I attempted to take a picture, the woman talking with Megan did not, like many others simply ignore me. She instantly called me out. “Wha...

“Is biological evolution a fact?” This question, hurled downward by a professor strutting up the stairs of a tiered classroom at Purdue University, briefly made me wonder whether I’d stumbled into the wrong lecture hall. Aubrie and I had returned to Purdue three years after my debate with Dr. Ralph Webb , Professor of Communications, for a new faceoff—this time with Dr. David Sanders, Associate Professor of Biology. Bracing myself for a discussion this time grounded in hard science, Aubrie and I invested hours drilling through issues I predicted Sanders might address. But as soon as cross-examination began, I realized this event—while boasting theatrical flair I’ve not seen in other formal debates, from Dr. Sanders’s signature hat to his style of circling the room and sitting down next to students while speaking—reflected the same elevation of ideology over fact we’ve seen countless times before. Dr. Sanders argued that macro-evolution—which we have not observed—is a pro...