Seth Drayer will be on campus next week to debate communication professor Geoff Klinger as part of a week of events sponsored by DePauw's chapter of Students for Life America.
Drayer is the director of training for Created Equal, a pro-life organization based in Columbus, Ohio that equips students with the knowledge of pro-life apologetics and leads them in engaging their own peers in a dialogue.
Junior Erin Komornik, the current president of DePauw's chapter of Students for Life America, originally met Drayer at the Students for Life America National Conference this past year.
"He's very on point, and he knows what he's talking about," Komornik said of Drayer.
The debate will feature a formal resolution format, meaning each side knows the resolution beforehand. Drayer will affirm that elective abortion is a human rights injustice, while Klinger will negate this idea. The entire debate should be about an hour long, with a question and answer period with the audience after.
"It's going to be a little bit shorter than what we originally wanted, but we wanted to make sure that we held everyone's attention the whole time, because all of the material is going to be important," Komornik said.
Although they are still waiting on approval, the group wants to have their Cemetery of the Innocence display up next week from Monday through Friday. They have put up similar displays in the past two years.
The group will be writing information of their events in chalk throughout campus on Tuesday. On Wednesday evening there will be a pro-life apologetics training session with Drayer.
"You don't have to be necessarily part of our organization, but it's extended to anyone that is pro-life and wants to learn how to defend [their view] scientifically and philosophically," Komornik said, "but that's not where we want to have the debate."
Instead, the debate, which is open to everyone, will occur the following night, Thursday, in the Olin Auditorium at 8 p.m. In addition, during the lunch hour on Thursday, the group will be tabling in the academic quad with a display asking people when they personally believe life begins.
The series of events will conclude with a donation drive outside of Walmart for the Crisis Pregnancy Center of Putnam County and a viewing of the documentary "It's a Girl" sometime next week. The documentary focuses on the worldwide gendercide of females being aborted, killed after birth, abducted, neglected and left simply because of their gender. The group hopes that by showing the documentary they will broaden the discussion into women's rights.
However, the group has had several issues finding someone to take up the challenge of debating Drayer. The group began by reaching out to the Feminista group on campus. They then extended the invitation to any professor who has a strong feeling to their pro-choice conviction. Then, with no luck in the first two endeavors, they reached out to the debate team and professor Klinger.
"I think he's going to bring something that probably no other professor can because he knows how debates work and he knows how to prepare for that," Komornik said.
Komornik thinks that having a well-known professor will bring more people to the debate, which was an over-arching goal that they had. Komornik offered a potential reason that the group had a difficult time finding an opponent for Drayer.
"If you aren't that convicted to it," Komornik said, "you don't want to put your name to it."
Klinger, also the director of Forensics at DePauw, admits that he had reservations about accepting the challenge.
"I kind of wring my hands about it because I know that it is a contentious issue and a lot of people are very committed to one side or the other of the debate," Klinger said. "At first blush, I didn't want to be a part of the debate, but as I thought about it more, my students encouraged me to go ahead and give it a try."
Rather than come out with a strong pro-choice message, Klinger is taking a different approach: look at arguments that Drayer will bring and grapple with them as they come up.
"I don't think I'm going to spend hours of research to engage in this topic," Klinger said.
Klinger noted that while his classes do debates, he tends to discourage people from taking on the hot-button issues. He also offered a different perspective as to why professors seemed unwilling to participate in the debate.
"DePauw professors are pretty busy in general, and you have somebody who it seems to be that a lot of his career is devoted to this particular cause, so in many ways, he's an expert in the area," Klinger said. "Other people don't have the same kind of background and depth of knowledge that perhaps he has, so it's probably kind of daunting to take on somebody with the kind of credentials that he has on this particular topic."
Klinger believes that this is an important issue that, regardless of their beliefs, students should be informed about, especially in light of the attempt in Indiana to defund Planned Parenthood. This has led to other states to attempt to follow suit, and states like Arkansas not licensing abortion doctors from outside the state to practice within the state.
Klinger was delighted by the opportunity to have a debate on a topic that many people don't talk about, let alone engage in discourse.
"The fact that you can handle fairly contentious issues in a respectful way and have a civic dialogue about things that people have such strong feelings about I think creates a nice kind of model for students on how to have that type of civic engagement," Klinger said.
In contrast, Drayer is preparing by reviewing the science of embryology, studying philosophy and watching to past debates that his mentors have done.
"[Pro-Lifers] have been characterized as anti-science, but we actually use and celebrate science to clearly affirm the humanity of the pre-born," Drayer said.
Drayer believes that debates like this are important.
"We've never really had a national debate. Roe v. Wade decided abortion de facto for the country," Drayer said.
Drayer believes that in order to debate there must be two things: facts and respectful manners.
"If we can't have a civil conversation that is based upon civility and exchanging of ideas in a respectful way, we can never have arrive at a conclusion," Drayer said. "If the students gain nothing else from the evening of the debate, I think they will see from professor Klinger and I that we both can engage in a respectful dialogue, and they can too."
Drayer added: "They may have friends on the opposite side, but they will learn that evening how to exchange ideas civilly without compromising and without defaming the other person."