71% of Gen Zers think abortion is morally acceptable.
How do you talk to a Gen Z pro-abortion person and win them for life?
That is next.
Hey, welcome back to the Barry Farrar Show.
You know, the abortion issue won't be solved by the Supreme Court ruling.
When it comes to abortion, almost everyone has a belief.
They fit into five camps of belief,
ranging from believing it's morally wrong
all the way up to morally right in all instances.
71% of Gen Zers think abortion is morally acceptable
or even morally right.
At the same time, over 70% support some limits.
Particularly when you get into the details of embryo development,
they believe there are needing to be some limitations to abortion on demand.
Now let's look at who has abortions.
According to the Guttmacher Institute,
moms 29 or younger have 73% of all abortions.
So the question on the table is,
how do Gen Zers, who are all under 28,
frame their beliefs on abortion?
Well, anytime you try to categorize a group,
it's really not fair.
There are people in every generation.
Every classification just doesn't fit the stereotype
of the social scientists' broad generalizations,
their broad classifications.
Yet, social scientists do study generations,
and these sociologists gather information in a variety of ways,
and they do field observations, they do interviews,
written questionnaires, they put together all these statistics.
They have these historical documents,
they do content analysis,
and they do what's called artifactual data.
Artifactual data is basically anything that's related to human activity.
So, these sociologists, these social scientists,
collect data, and they lay out a theory,
then they form a hypothesis,
then they make empirical observations,
and then they analyze the data to confirm or reject
or modify that original theory.
It's kind of the scientific method for human behavior.
They have performed this exercise under the scrutiny of peers
for all living generations.
The elders include the silent generation
and the greatest generation.
Biden is in the silent generation.
The few remaining greatest generation are in their 100s.
Social scientists have drawn conclusions from this approach for boomers.
Even broken boomers into the first and the second wave.
Trump is a first waver.
Johnny Depp is in the last part of that second boomer wave.
Gen Xers include Jennifer Lopez, Ted Cruz, and Mariah Carey.
Millennials include Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Boebert,
AOC, and Prince William.
But I'd like to look at the abortion life issue
through the lens of the typical Gen Z-er.
Now, don't get offended if you're a Gen Z-er and you don't agree
that the general categorizations are just not true for you.
No worries.
These are just general results from the sociologist's studies.
And I'm not a Gen Z-er.
I didn't even stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night
to gain all kinds of Gen Z insight.
Yet, I have studied Gen Z both for business and political reasons
for the past five years.
And these young people are just amazing in so many ways.
They grew up with a deep connection to technology.
And it's really difficult for boomers and Xers to fully understand
how deep that is.
Gen Z-ers were always aware of technology,
just from their first moments of being aware of anything.
Millennials are fluent with technology.
But Z-ers are literally integrated with it.
To them, the boomers and the Xers' old school methods
are just inefficient.
The Gen Z-er grew up with cell phones, social media, and Wi-Fi
from the beginning.
And according to this extensive study by the University of Florida,
there are significant human interaction differences with Gen Z
over all their previous generations.
You know, teens check their phones constantly.
Growing up with these technological advances
can have both strengths and weaknesses.
Gen Z-ers have an edge over any other generation
when it comes to technology.
I mean, they can quickly communicate with people around the world with ease.
The known disadvantage, though, is that technology
is used as a replacement for social interaction.
Millennials didn't get their first phone until they were teenagers,
or even later, on average for the most part.
So they had an old school interaction phase in their developmental years.
Jan Ziers went straight to technology from their very earliest memories.
So with less interaction face-to-face than they have with video games.
So they've got less interaction with people than they do with video games or social media
and smartphones.
They are inclined to avoid certain face-to-face struggles.
They have a bond with digital media.
They're emotionally attached to technology.
In fact, 90% of teens from five years ago, young adult Ziers today, described their worst
form of punishment as being grounded from their access to the internet.
That was more than losing their allowance.
They could learn about good things, but they could also learn about self-harm without their
parents even having a clue.
So regardless of ethnicity, Jan Ziers see social media as just part of their life.
Facebook became available to Jan Ziers pervasively when they were in their adolescence.
They were very early adapters with Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter.
As late as 2016, Jan Z like to use Twitter because most parents at that time didn't know
about it.
Every generation has social pressure during their teens.
Every single one.
They all have a fear of missing out.
An Xer would define being left out of a social gathering as just a party.
A Zier would define being left out, and their self-confidence would be measured to a degree
by how much they were accepted on social media.
In other words, if they saw their friends on social media socializing without them,
they'd feel extreme unhappiness.
In fact, a group of neuroscientists studied what happens to the brain when a young person
is left out of a social media experience who has grown up as Jan Z.
And it triggers physical pain.
And since they have direct access to what their peers are doing, it can cause social
rejection more frequently than previous generations.
Multiple studies show that all generations are impacted by social media.
But for Jan Ziers, they're integrated with it.
Just like a blankie was for the boomer, a smartphone could be for a Jan Zier.
It's just hard for them to separate themselves for long periods of time from technology,
which is largely wrapped up in their smartphone.
And this causes some to feel left out of things or feel lonely and wish they could have more
good friends.
The notion of projecting an impossibly perfect social image triggers a misperception of reality.
They think their lives are not as good or exciting as their peers, many of whom they've
only had limited face-to-face connection with.
Every generation had some of these acceptance challenges, every one.
But social media amplifies them.
It causes teens to think they're failures on a wide scale.
The envy issue can be extreme.
Most teens of all generations feel good about themselves on a comparative basis.
They get off to college and they feel better about themselves.
With the advent of the wide distribution of her peers' exotic vacation photos and
these amazing destination weddings and these other positive life experiences that are projected
on their social media, it creates this environment for an easier ability to make a more credible
embellishment.
Now, back in the day, you could weave a fish story and try to embellish how great you were,
but your peers could ask you some questions face-to-face and uncover your humanity.
When everything is digital, though, and can be easily touched up and edited, believing
teens can have this huge self-esteem issue.
Teens and young adults can feel that their friends never fail at things.
Studies on college students found that the ease of social comparison leads to depression,
particularly when it's used so much that it's a replacement for in-person contact.
And then the algorithms drive exacerbation of this social comparison.
The more you interact with a person or page, the more you see their posts.
And this creates a larger-than-life reality, and this can adversely impact emotional stamina
or even emotional intelligence.
Most receive their news from a select version of social media, according to Pew Research.
This doesn't allow for a balance of perspectives or even for what's real, because the algorithms
reinforce the notion that most people think exactly like you do.
So for most Gen Zers, technology-based relationships and technology-controlled inputs on the news
of the day is their actual reality.
This causes two things.
It makes it hard to handle a direct conversation from another perspective.
And it creates the tendency to mimic and converge emotionally without awareness.
Zers tend to base their self-esteem off of social comparisons and try to act like the
people they see on social media, even if they're unaware that they're doing that.
This is called emotion.
emotional contagion and it can also work in a group setting.
This is when the moods of one group transfer to the moods
of another group. Now on the positive side, when you're high in emotional contagion,
which the Gen Zers are,
it does improve cooperation in the workforce and even decreases conflict.
On the other hand, cyber bullies can transfer negative emotional posts and
have an outsized impact
versus face-to-face human interaction. That person that
is a bully might really be a small person physically and not be that
intimidating at all.
But Gen Zers might be adversely affected by that cyber
bully. Now on the positive side, Gen Zers appear to have a very high level of
compassion and they see themselves as thoughtful
and concerned about others. The video chat capability has actually been shown
to improve cognitive empathy.
On the other hand, Gen Zers feel anxiety, strangeness, and panic
when absent from their cell phone. They just don't know what to do when
they don't know what everyone else is doing. Research shows that watching news
through social media, for example,
a mass shooting in real time, just delivers too
much negative news for the neurotransmitters to handle.
As such, we become hardened to emotional experience
and we've just got less empathy. So Gen Zers are the
primary age range where their parents
are Gen Xers. And those Gen Xers
had focused on a friend-parent approach. That was versus the
advisor disciplinarian approach of their parents. And this has its pros and cons.
Research shows that 88 percent of those in the Gen Z
area felt that their parents are their friends
rather than their advisors or even their coaches.
Gen Xers are known to have this high energy level, they're creative, they're
multitaskers.
But technology is not native for them.
For them it's a tool and they thought it was a good tool to hand to their kids.
For their kids though, it's part of their very existence.
Now the business community understands all this. They've studied it.
They've studied it so much so that Gen X
and Boomer managers have gone to extensive training sessions to learn how
to communicate with their Gen Z employees through a variety of technology
platforms like Slack.
Gen Zers are like Millennials in that they desire to create meaning and
they value formal education and they desire their own personal experience
but they're more independent than Millennials. They're more entrepreneurial,
they're more competitive and a little more driven by security. Social scientists
say there's
a direct impact based on your surroundings and even if you aren't
tuned into it, it affects you. Your political environment has an impact on
you whether you
are aware of it or not. Now if you're a Boomer, you grew up in a much different
time than a Gen Zer.
You rode your bike for miles from home even after dark.
Your parents just generally speaking were not that concerned about your safety.
As you came of age, on a geopolitical level, a Boomer
thought that everything dangerous was far away
and in light of the Soviet Union which was played out in a proxy war with
Vietnam
and communism and socialism were showing their ugly head in real time.
Nationally, for the Boomer, the big news stories were Watergate which was a
scandal
sourced in paranoia for a president, civil rights and
abortion. Despite stronger disagreements,
the United States was more unified than today if for no other reason
there were only three primary sources for the news on TV
and there was still a general belief that at least externally
you needed to have decorum that should lead the day.
Xers were impacted by the Persian Gulf War, AIDS
and rising crime. On the positive side, agree or disagree with that war,
they observed the United States as powerful and a winner.
President Bush Senior famously said,
we finally got that monkey Vietnam off our back.
Millennials came of age during a massive recession.
They kind of felt robbed, gypped. There was also this
economic housing meltdown that brought us into that recession.
They observed the 9-11 attack on US soil as a kid.
They witnessed the first black president, gay marriage becoming legal by the
Supreme Court ruling and an overall ethos of
less pride in America. They didn't agree that America
was all that exceptional. The president they grew up with, Obama,
was regularly cannibalizing America culturally.
He was weakening us abroad and presuming racial prejudice upon
everybody here domestically
across the board. Millennials
that adopted that worldview, social scientists
say, actually became fearful of political debate.
They couldn't handle somebody that was on the other side, which was usually a
conservative. Most Millennials
are liberal. That's why they believe it's acceptable
to censor a political debate.
ideas. So that's Millennials.
Now Gen Zers have a very different experience. Theirs helps us understand
why social scientists conclude
that Gen Zers don't like debate issues too, but it's different than Millennials.
And in fact they're generally put off by the whole concept
of opposing sides. In contrast, both boomers and Xers grew up enjoying
respectful relationships
and even good friends with people whom they disagreed with
politically. That's certainly not the case for Gen Zers.
They observed political hostility from day one.
Some social scientists claim that that's why
Zers are more intense about diversity acceptance,
and embracing what you love, and rejecting
what you don't. Social scientists concur that Gen Zers don't enjoy debating the
big issues like their grandparent boomers.
They point to social media as the desensitizer.
Barna surveyed young Gen Zers to uncover some of their moral beliefs, and
according to Barna, only 34 percent think lying
is wrong. Yet almost 90 percent think it's wrong
to challenge another person's beliefs, especially if it embarrasses them.
They don't like the hostility that seems to come from that confrontation.
In fact, they're selective about what others
should believe. A full 66 percent of Gen Zers
think it is wrong to have a belief
if that belief offends other people.
Now that can be tough to do. I mean, even negotiating a relatively mundane issue
like where to put a stoplight can result in someone being
offended. So how does a Gen Xer
or a boomer engage with a Gen Zer
and invite them to another point of view when it comes to the issue of life
and abortion? Well, I don't know for sure,
but I did ask some Gen Zers, and these fun, delightful, full-of-life Zers have
had some success.
Now admittedly, they're in that 29 percent minority,
but they know how their 71 percent peers
think. They persuade with a winsome tone.
These Zers have been effective in changing the minds of their contemporaries.
So here's my summary of how they go about it.
To solicit legit engagement,
I'm told, the case for any discussion on abortion must be
in the context of authenticity, justice,
and control. Now let's look at each. Authenticity is partly explained
with nuance. For example, the history of abortion
is complex. Now part of the Hippocratic oath
initially signed by Hippocrates back in 400 BC
condemns abortion. Yet, Protestant Christians through the 1800s didn't
think the baby was alive until quickening,
and that's the time when the mom can feel the baby kick.
It's just not honest to say that Christians had a consistent understanding
throughout history.
They had a biblical argument for life, but not at conception.
When they looked at Psalm 139, there's a verse there that describes God's
deliberate involvement in the mother's womb.
They interpret it as God forming in the womb the life and the soul during the
first part of the pregnancy.
At quickening, that's when it was alive.
So up until that time, even many Protestant Christians did not oppose
abortion until midterm.
When science convincingly displayed
the movement of this developing child, most Protestants unified
at a much earlier time frame of when they believe the person
is alive. But humility and admission
lay a foundation for conversation. So that's first,
authenticity. Admit what's wrong. Admit what you didn't know.
Second is the notion of justice.
As it relates to abortion, the argument of the Gen Zer is pretty straightforward.
One young lady should not have more access to an abortion than another.
In fact, the poor young lady in the pro-life state
is at a disadvantage to the rich young lady who can fly across state lines and
get an abortion even past viability.
I mean, in some states, they're talking about 28 days
after the baby is born.
So, how do you approach this definition of justice?
Well first, remain authentic. From a pure linear logic perspective, the Gen Zer
has a point.
He would argue that if abortion is just, then a young lady who wants to have an
abortion should be able to have one.
Yet, justice needs
some context. In the big picture
scheme of things, how is justice really defined?
Now, in any ethics discussion, justice includes
all the living human beings that are affected by whatever that discussion is.
So...
When you look at a little human living being,
when is that little human being needing to be given justice?
So my Gen Z friends would recommend
starting with a question,
which opens the door to think about equality
and justice for the precious little one,
as well as for the young lady.
They recommend a loving tone with a tough question.
When do you think life begins?
Dead things don't grow, the embryo grows.
At conception, the little one has all the ingredients
for life that he or she will need.
So when did he or she start to be alive?
Now, if the Gen Zer is true to her colors,
her desire for authenticity and his longing for justice
will result in a modified view of abortion on demand.
Maybe if that is, in fact, a life inside the womb,
it should be treated with equal human rights.
Now, the final issue is control.
The Gen Zer says that no woman
should be under the control of another.
She should be able to make her own decisions
and not be managed by anyone else, especially by a man.
The traditional response has been
in the line of direct logic.
It takes two to tango.
Ultimately, except in the instance of rape,
the woman is in control.
She can just say, no thanks, until she's ready to be a mom.
But that's an old school logical argument.
And I grew up in that environment.
And the reality is that only a very small percentage of us
actually lived up to that aspirational goal,
and those that did, by the skin of their teeth.
The reality is it just doesn't work that often.
Young ladies don't always want to say no,
and she doesn't always want to use preventative measures.
And often, she's so young, she's not really thinking it
all the way through.
Unfortunately, the law of nature does not
comply all the time with that straightforward argument.
So if a young lady gets pregnant before she wants to be a mom,
how does she navigate not being under the control of another?
If she has an abortion, she may have side effects,
but she has no child to be responsible for.
If she gives the child up for adoption,
that could turn out to be a real blessing,
but she might feel embarrassed or uncertain
about that outcome.
So to this, our Gen Z friends would
counsel us to discuss this whole conversation
in this context around the human rights issue.
It's a real issue, but it's larger than one person.
Again, they recommend a gentle tone with a tough question.
They borrow from the UN's declaration
after World War II.
Just about everyone agrees that humans
should be given certain rights regardless.
They're inherent.
They're not given by governments.
They should just be protected by governments,
like in our Declaration of Independence,
that right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
So the Gen Zers would ask their peers the following question,
coming right out of that UN declaration.
At what point are the rights inherent to all human beings,
regardless of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity,
language, religion, or any other status, applicable to a baby?
This is sort of an extension of the when is the baby alive
question.
This approach doesn't mean you'll win over a pro-abortion
Gen Zer to a pro-life worldview.
Yet these three issues, authenticity, justice,
and control, need to be understood.
And any conversation that we have with them
needs to be in that context.
It's the only way to set up an empathetic conversation
with the typical Gen Zer.
It applies to all issues, but abortion
is one of the most challenging.
I'm for life, and I believe we should protect innocent life.
But I'm not going to win that debate
without respecting and serving the Gen Zer where she is.
To your freedom.
Hi, I'm David Farah.
Thank you for listening to my dad's podcast, The Barry Farah
Show, Culture Shift.
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