 Okay. Finally, the moderator of tonight's program is Laura Chasen, and she's the founder and the director of the Public Conversations Project, which is a not-for-profit organization that promotes constructive conversations and relationships among those who hold clashing values, worldviews, and positions related to diverse public issues. A former family therapist, Laura's work took a more public turn after she saw a televised discussion about abortion to generate into a screaming match. She started facilitating talks in 1990 and learned over time the types of ground rules that calm participants' fears and enable them to listen to one another. Groups served by public conversations include international church communities split over issues of sexuality, a city's human services department that was experiencing conflict among its diverse staff members, and even the U.S. House of Representatives, which participated in a bipartisan retreat led by the organization. I hope your curiosity has peaked, and so without further delay, it is my pleasure to give you Laura Chasen and our panelists. Thank you for coming. Good evening. I don't like to start a talk with a disclaimer, but much as we would have liked to, PCP did not actually facilitate the retreat for the U.S. Congress. We were part of the facilitation team, but that was not our own project. We really appreciate the opportunity that the Fort Hall Forum has given us to meet with all of you tonight. This is the first time that all six of the panelists have appeared in public since their initial press conference that followed the Globe's publication of Talking to the Enemy, which they wrote together almost two years ago. So it feels to us like quite a historic occasion. The reason I'm serving as your moderator tonight is that I was one of the two facilitators of the dialogue that is the focus of this evening's program. Unfortunately, Susan Potzeba, my co-facilitator, could not be with us tonight. This is how the program will flow. I'll give you a little bit of background about the events that preceded the first meeting of our panelists. Then each panelist will introduce herself and say something about her experience before, during, or outside the dialogue. At that point, I will invite you to join us in co-producing an audience panelist dialogue in which your questions shape the rest of the conversation. For now, I invite you to listen with the ears of a dialogue participant rather than with the ears of a debater. Essentially, this means listening for what you do not understand rather than what you do not agree with. The more you can do this, the more you will be adopting one of the practices that the panelists use that made their conversations so productive. The most useful questions you can ask later in the program, the questions that will promote all of our learning, are likely to be questions that come from what you do not understand and want to learn more about. Before we go further, I'd like to learn a little bit about you. How many of you have had a frustrating, painful, or damaging conversation with someone who thinks very differently about abortion than you do? If you could just stick up a hand. How many of you have participated in a constructive conversation with someone who has different views about abortion than you? Okay, some, smaller, but some. How many of you have read Talking to the Enemy, Boston Globe article co-authored by our panelists? Many. And finally, how many of you were not in the Boston area on December 30th, 1994? Uh-huh, quite a number of you. That's good information. As most of you know, on December 30th, almost eight years ago, John Salvi entered two Brookline clinics that provide reproductive healthcare services, including abortion, and shot and killed two people and injured five others. 12 days later, Cardinal Law and Governor Weld met privately, agreed that this was a time for a lowering of voices, and jointly called for what they called common ground talks. Cardinal Law also called for a pro-life moratorium on demonstrations at the clinics. The following month, the Public Conversations Project in Watertown and Susan Podziba in Brookline reached out to each other with similar ideas on their minds. We both were genuinely uncertain whether high-level talks could do more good than harm. We also were unsure whether if talks were called for they would be more like a dialogue or more like a mediation. If we step forward, we wanted to be part of a team that could go in either direction. So we decided to step forward together. Susan brought a distinguished background in public mediation and consensus building. I and my colleagues at the Public Conversations Project, as you have heard, brought experience conducting constructive conversations about divisive issues, especially public issues that challenge the worldviews and threaten the core values of those involved. In the following week, Susan and I interviewed about 20 formal or informal leaders of the pro-life and pro-choice movements and other community leaders. We sought to discover whether the conditions were present that would permit a new and constructive kind of dialogue to take place between pro-choice and pro-life leaders. We discovered a high degree of consensus that talks could be useful. We also found high levels of agreement about what the goals of these talks should be, what ground rules should be were essential, what criteria should be used in selecting participants, and who some of the participants should be. These are the goals that were recommended and became the goals of this dialogue. To develop relations built on mutual respect and understanding that can contain differences about values and policies. To clarify differences and identify shared values and concerns. To exchange information on matters of mutual concern. To create direct channels of communication with leaders on the other side. To help de-escalate the polarization between pro-choice and pro-life groups in Massachusetts. And to consider one or more joint activities. The ground rules that were agreed to and include the ground rules that were the basis of this dialogue were to keep the contents, indeed the very fact of the meetings confidential. To refrain from attempts to persuade or convert. To avoid interrupting and rhetorical questions. To use considerate language. To speak as an individual and not as a we. And to pass if you are not ready or willing to speak or respond to any question you were asked. In mid-summer, after following the shootings, Susan and I faced a choice between waiting in hopes of recruiting individuals who would have made the group more diverse in terms of gender, race, or religion. Or starting the dialogue with who we had in order to complete it in time for the first anniversary of the shootings, which everyone said was essential. So we decided to proceed with those who had already been identified as promising participants, the six women on this panel. We met with each of them again, gave each of them the dialogue and debate table that you, I think you were received on the way in, and made sure they understood the kind of meeting to which they were being invited and that they endorsed its goals and ground rules. In short, we made sure that those who accepted our invitation understood that they were being asked to engage in talks that were a dialogue rather than a debate, a mediation, or a search for common ground on public policy. The panelists agreed to attend four meetings. Due to the constraints of eight calendars, these meetings were compressed into a three-week period in September, 1995. Susan Paziba and I co-facilitated these meetings, which were held in Watertown, lasted an average of four hours, and usually included a meal. I'll turn it over to you. Approximately eight years ago, on December 30, 1994, a bright, cold, crystal-clear day, I received a phone call from my husband, conveying a spine-chilling message. A shooting had occurred at Planned Parenthood's Brookline Clinic. I raced to Beacon Street and arrived within 30 minutes to discover Shannon Lowney's dead body lying covered on the floor of our reception area. Within a minute, I learned that three other individuals had been wounded and transferred to hospitals. It was as though an earthquake measuring 10 degrees on the Richter scale had occurred. I'm Nikki Nichols-Gamble, and I was in my 20th year as president of the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts. I was 52 years old. I was confronting the greatest personal and professional challenge of my life and career. Nothing would ever be the same. I was thoroughly traumatized. Following the initial days of functioning on autopilot, I began questioning whether I had what it would take to steer myself and my organization on a dangerous and exhausting journey of rebirth and recovery. My responsibility was clear in collaboration with my colleagues to sustain Planned Parenthood's services to its patients and clients, to calm and stabilize a profoundly traumatized staff, and to create an entirely new level of security guidelines and precautions designed to prevent future deadly attacks. Following John Salvi's murderous rampage, I became increasingly intolerant of the opposition. I dismissed the leaders and the followers as unintelligent hooligans. I routinely used rhetoric to diminish their rationality and humor to negate their humanity. I joined the public conversations project's flagship group with little optimism, but in the conviction that I could leave no stone unturned in my quest to reduce the violence targeted at providers of reproductive health care services. This evening, I will tell you about being transformed by this experience while remaining totally committed to my pro-choice position, a theme I think you will hear from others. I have participated in this facilitated dialogue for seven years because I came to cherish the participants and the experiences that developed across a deeply divided chasm. I firmly believe that it is in confronting difference and diversity that we promote personal growth by opening ourselves to new perspectives and new behaviors, leading to more creative and civil ways of being in a complex and mysterious world. I'm Madeline McComish, and on the day of the shooting, I was the volunteer president of Massachusetts Citizens for Life, which is the largest pro-life group here in Massachusetts. And as Nikki says, it was a terrible, terrible time. The idea that someone would take life and call themselves a champion of the pro-life movement by doing so was something that was so abhorrent and so contradictory to everything that we stood for that it really was a very terrible time. We were only able, the people on the other side and ourselves, to communicate through the media. We had no personal contact. And as Nikki said, the communication through the media was not cordial. Understandably so was not cordial. We agreed to come to these meetings in the hope of reducing the tension that was so thick in both movements and also in the hope of reaching the other person as a human being. I have to tell you, I was very, very scared going into the meetings. I thought that perhaps the hostility that had been portrayed in the media would continue in these talks. Also, I felt that the people that I was going to be meeting participated in activities that I considered so abhorrent that it was very difficult for me to see how anything good could come of this. But I have to tell you that even during and after that first meeting, I realized that these were people that I really liked. People who were as convinced of their position as I am of mine. People whom I could come to love and did come to love. Also, I have to tell you that the moderators, the facilitators were absolutely incredible. You cannot believe it was almost miraculous the way they controlled the meeting, kept us from using language that was offensive to the other parties, and taught us how to listen. And if anyone were to ask me what did you get from this, one of the main things I would have to say is it taught me to really listen. To really listen to the other person and try to understand where they are coming from. That has been something that has carried through into everything that I do in my work and in my volunteer work as a pro-life activist. I have to say too that there were some very painful times. The most painful time I can remember was when I realized that we were never ever going to agree. That the differences between us were so fundamental that there was no way I was ever going to convince them that my position was the right one. And that pain, however, was very much outweighed by the positive feelings that we developed for each other and the communication that we had not only in the meetings, but also in the public forum, even though we were not allowed to discuss anything or even say that the meetings were going on, there was an effect on the rhetoric on both sides that was very deescalating to the conflict. So I think I've used my three minutes. I'm Ann Fowler and on that day in December that Nikki and Madeline have both referred to, I was sitting in my office in my rectory in Jamaica Plain where I'm the rector of St. John's Episcopal Church and I learned about the shootings because I received a call from a very tearful hysterical parishioner who was calling me as her priest but also knowing that I was pro-choice and knew people at Plain Parenthood and at Preterm and that I would have both a professional and personal concern about this. I had been, I would say, a pro-choice activist in the Episcopal Church for all of my, well, since before my ordained ministry, the Episcopal Church is officially pro-choice but as with many things in the Episcopal Church we are not monolithic at all in our beliefs and I had participated in conversations within the Episcopal Church of the same nature as the Public Conversations Project that is getting pro-choice and pro-life people together to talk about our differences and I participated in earlier iterations of the Public Conversation Project and so I did feel on some level hopeful and because I knew Susan and I didn't know Susan but as I knew Laura as a facilitator I had hoped that we would be civil to one another. I didn't and I felt called to participate because I feel as part of my vocation to say to the church but more important really to say to the world outside the church that there is a religious pro-choice voice and so when there are opportunities to speak about that I feel called to do that but beyond that commitment I wasn't sure what we would accomplish. I would have to say that being in the Public Conversations Project and I've said this often is one of the hardest things that I've ever done. I spend most of my professional life trying to build community and so I'm familiar with that and certainly I try to as we all in the church are called to do and to stay in community with people with whom I disagree and encourage other people to stay in community with folks with whom they disagree and as we say in the business speak the truth in love but we often deal with that by agreeing not to talk about the things that we disagree about and so this opportunity to spend now seven years in very intense conversation only about things that one disagrees about has been remarkable and it really has been an extraordinary opportunity. Personally I well personally and professionally I guess I would say that I came to think before too long this must have been what it was like in the early church for Jews and Christians who were religious and cultural enemies to be meeting together in a windowless room as we did so often and sharing meals and talking about what held them together trying to figure out how to stay together and what their common understandings were and I thought I'll never I will never I will never probably have a better opportunity to understand that. I think another reason that I was that I felt compelled to stay is that I have had an abortion and one of the one of the things that I felt called to do throughout the dialogues was to say that that to remind everyone of that truth and to say abortion is not necessarily a tragedy I have this experience that I that I can talk about and I'm going to talk about it. Nikki used the word transformation again in the church business we talk about conversion and I think it's been for me an experience of constant conversion to patients to understanding and to a deeper deeper contemplation of the mystery of human connection even in the midst of deep deep disagreement. My name is Fran Hogan and the what I do for a living is I'm a commercial real estate lawyer with a Boston law firm but as a volunteer at the time of these shootings I was serving as executive vice president of mass citizens for life and as president of women affirming life and I had come to the pro-life movement through a journey that took me as a young woman attorney when we're not very many through working for civil rights for all that was the background from which my pro-life ethic grew. The day of the shootings I was home it was around New Year's Eve and I had the day off and I heard the news and many of the pro-life leadership gathered that evening at Cardinal Law's residence he called together people from the pro-life community to see what we could do because this was such a horrible horrible act and that night there were tremendous numbers of telephone calls for interviews on television shows and radio shows and we split those up and people went in different directions and one of the most painful episodes that occurred to me occurred with Nikki. I was on the same television show with Nikki and I think it was channel five but I'm not really certain and when I arrived there they put you in a side room and Nikki was in the room with her husband and it was a failing of mine as a human being. I walked into that room and I was devastated by what had happened because being pro-life what had happened was totally antithetical to the pro-life ethic and I didn't go over to Nikki and I didn't go over to her and tell her that I was sorry, horribly sorry about what had happened. I didn't know what to do. I think that the media's presentation of our characters had frozen me in time and space where I set my humanity aside and just performed my role as a pro-life activist and I was deeply disturbed when I went home that night and I thought in any other situation I would have gone right over to her as a human being told her how sorry I was, what could I do? So that was in my mind. I carried that for a long time and when this opportunity came for the public conversations, I had thought of all the people on the other side really in this kind of way as almost if they weren't human just caricatures of human beings as I think Nikki sort of said about our side. So I didn't have a lot of hope about it. However, I knew as a pro-life activist for I don't know how many years at the time that whatever I was doing wasn't working. So my theory was I know we weren't supposed to try to convince people of anything but my theory always has been that if I speak the truth which I believe I do, that it will touch people's hearts. So I felt that if we had this opportunity to share about the truth maybe it would touch people's hearts. So the second piece of the puzzle that was interesting is that both Madeline and I had known John Salvi, the fellow who murdered and wounded these people and I wound up testifying at the murder trial of John Salvi for the prosecution because we had known him. So that was another piece of it which was extremely difficult. Anyway, for the first meeting Madeline and myself and Barbara gathered together in a friendlies right near the public conversations project where we fed our faces and prayed in that order actually I think. But anyway, because we were so nervous about meeting people with whom we did not agree. The first four meetings as Laura has mentioned were very difficult and very tightly facilitated and would never have happened without the facilitation because they basically took away from us the words we normally used for each other. I don't mean those bad words, I mean just ordinary words that we found out words that I would not have known might have been offensive to another person or that the other side didn't know were offensive to me. So we took all of those hot button words out of our vocabularies which made speaking quite difficult. We had to come up with a whole new vocabulary which really said something important about what we were about. We finally got through that and of course as others have said the experience has really been life altering. It certainly has impacted me in many other ways other than directly within the pro-life community. I had always thought that when we got down to the very basic discussion that we would sort of agree on some of these things and I found out that we really didn't agree on any of them. As Madeline has said there was a chasm between us and we finally, it took us a long time, it sounds funny now to realize that we basically had two completely different views of the world the role of a human person in the world, the role of law in society and just a million different differences on those sorts of things and that was very painful to discover because I had come to really care about these people and love these people and just assumed that we would be able to come to closure on some of those issues. The one thing that was wonderful is the fact that I never talked at such a deep level with people in my life because you tend to hang out with people that agree with you on a lot of things. We tested each other's beliefs, we tested each other's philosophies. We really looked at these issues very, very seriously and I think that for me at least it went to the depth of why I believe what I believe and again I was strengthened if anything I was strengthened in my commitment to the pro-life ethic. However I think that this experience has been extraordinarily valuable for me and for the others I'm sure. It taught us how to communicate in a civil way I think for all those many years that wasn't happening and I of course thought it was the media that was always attacking us I'm not saying that the other side didn't feel differently however I felt that this gave us an opportunity, those of us who are pro-life to have our point of view presented outside in a calm civilized way and I felt that that was very worthwhile. As a result of this I've had many conversations with people over the last couple of years who have read the article who may not agree with me but at least we were able to have these civil conversations and I think especially in this time and place we found ourselves the ability to do that was really an extraordinary gift. So overall it's been just a wonderful experience and I'm very, very glad to be here tonight with you. My name is Melissa Cogut and I'm the Executive Director of MassNARAL which is a reproductive rights organization and at the time that I was approached to participate in this dialogue I was a brand new Executive Director although I had been involved in the reproductive rights movement for many years before that and my initial reaction I think like my colleagues in the pro-choice movement was this is going to be a waste of time, I don't want to do this, nothing's going to come of it but I also felt my responsibility as a leader of a pro-choice organization that we were really facing some intense polarization in Massachusetts and the experience of having had people shot at and killed was unbearable and felt that it was really a responsibility to try something. The facilitators were great and they really convinced me that it could be possible to have a conversation and I actually was curious to see what I might learn from this experience. I love to talk about my experience in the dialogue because it has been a completely transforming experience. Normally when you're involved in a political movement like this the focus of our organization is about how we can move people into action so we are all about conveying information in the starkest possible terms to get people to... It's not like it's manipulative but it's really we want people to understand the issue so that they will go out and work on a political campaign and we'll be motivated to move. We don't spend a lot of time talking about shades of gray among ourselves let alone with others who we disagree with. So the experience of sitting down and talking with people from both the pro-choice and pro-lifeside with a focus on getting better at understanding was just remarkable and it was really hard at first because my orientation is... As I'm listening I'm thinking about crafting my argument and my response and that would happen from time to time and that wasn't as interesting as the conversations we had about figuring out what it was that we didn't understand about one another. I was in preparing and thinking about today and trying to think about some of the conversations we had that were surprising or interesting and two of them come to mind. We had a difficult conversation once about the so-called partial birth abortion bans which is what we call it. I know I can't even remember I'm sorry the words that we decided to use at the time of the conversation to be able to have that conversation but one of the things I was struck by was that we were both... That was using a different set of facts which made it really difficult to proceed with the conversation and I can remember there was an article that came out during that period where the pro-life women thought that we had been deliberately lying about the facts and that was an interesting conversation that we were able to explore pretty deeply. Another conversation that I thought was interesting was in talking about the way we show caring for one another and my experience of the way the other side shows caring is paternalistic and not very caring which is to prevent women from being able to make a choice for themselves and without going into a lot of the details. That was some of the... couple of the comments that I read... couple of the conversations that I remembered were very interesting and we were able to really go deeply to understand below the surface what is it that is driving our feelings and our positions about the issues. I think I want to conclude by saying that the thing that surprised me most was that we were able to write an article because we were writing an article from the perspective of six people about an experience and we all had a lot at stake. I mean I hadn't told most of my colleagues that I was participating in this and when I did tell them there were some shocking responses why did you waste your time doing this, what was the point of that? We really wanted to write an article to try to describe what the experience was and I frankly can't believe we did it. I think the article really gets at what the experience was and I'm really glad we were able to do that. So I think I'll stop and hand it over. I apologize for being late but I can affirm that the Northeastern students are a very friendly group. They were very helpful in getting me from the Renaissance garage to this building which is probably for those of you who know the way. It's not that easy. But I'm really am glad to be with all of you tonight. At the time that we first gathered at the time of the murders at the Brookline clinics I was director of the pro-life office for the Archdiocese and I had been director for some time since 1985 and I think one of the things that was very important to me and what really drew me to the opportunity of the dialogue was that it struck me that my office was maybe two miles, a mile and a half walking distance from Beacon Street and from the preterm clinic and from the Planned Parenthood clinic was a little further away, but not far. But it might as well have been on another planet. I mean, I had known from the news, Nicky, I did not know Anne or Melissa but these were people that I had, I don't want to say, that they were clearly people that I needed to have a personal conversation with but the thought actually never even occurred to me in terms of just picking up the phone and saying, hi, can we have coffee someday or have lunch someday? We need to know each other, we need to talk. So when the chance came that the public conversations provided for us to be gathered and to talk with one another, I had a lot of anxiety like everyone else about it and wondered, had misgivings, how was this going to work, what would be the value of it? But it was a really more personal desire, I think, to meet Nicky and to meet Anne and Melissa too, although I didn't know them, but to meet people who were leaders in the pro-choice movement and to have a chance to really understand and to find out what motivated their thinking and how they understood the issue. It seemed like there was a great chasm for sure between us and the murders at the clinics were such a, it was probably one of the worst moments in my life, the day that I learned of those horrible acts and it seemed that this could be a chance to do and to have, I don't know, maybe to break things open in a way. None of us I think could have anticipated that it would go for five, six years. I mean, we first committed the, it was to four meetings and even that seemed like, wow, how could we meet for four times and what would we say? But then somehow four meetings we just kept re-contracting and I think was partly the skill of the facilitation that gave us a safe container in which to have very important conversations. And I think that we learned a lot. We learned a lot about listening, about hearing things in ways that maybe we didn't anticipate. It was a chance to not be engaged in the issue in a combative way in a sense, I mean, like in a debate, but to really take it to another whole level and I think that really was an extraordinary opportunity and the blessing for me is particularly in the friendship and the knowledge and the relationships that evolved over those years and the caring that couldn't, that in the beginning was not even imagined that we would actually have any kind of personal relationship with those that we would be having dialogue with. So it was a very important endeavor and I think that it speaks to the possibilities that maybe in other protracted disagreements that where people tend to talk at a distance and talk through the media and have well, very clear public positions but there's something that's lost in terms of the humanity and of the personal communication that we all need to have about whether it's about the issue of life or other important issues of our day that we need to find ways that we can bridge some of the alienation and some of the polarizing effect of difference so that we can really treat one another as human beings and with care. So I'm very grateful to be here tonight and to share with all of you about it. Okay, I suggest you just take a minute and think about what you've heard so far. What interested you? What surprised you? What do you want to learn more about? If you could only ask one question to deepen your understanding, what would it be? And what I will do is sort of collect about five or six questions. We'll all listen to the questions. It reaches college last spring and it worked really nicely. Just to hear a sort of handful or so of your questions and then you will sort of pick in the wonderful, organic way you did before, respond to them. There may be one or two that people will choose to pass which was part of the Garen rules, I think, of the dialogue that made it feel safe. But I invite you, particularly those of you who have questions seeking more information, learning more, not less those who have rhetorical questions, which is one of our Garen rules, to come to a microphone and we'll sort of get a wave of inquiry from you and then move on. My name is Kate and I have a question about how it seems like this is a very personal, what to call this, movement or something. It's had a very personal effect on you. And I've been wondering how what you've experienced could be disseminated into the public view of this debate. Does that enough of a question? Thank you for starting off. Hi, my name is Susan Cher and I am president of the Ford Hall Forum. I want to thank you all for coming. This is really exciting and I have a lot of questions, but I'll just start with one and it has to do with somebody mentioned that there are words that you used to call each other and I'm wondering what some of those words were and what are the alternatives that you use and how you get your compatriots and colleagues to do the same. Susan, given your role that you invited us here, if you have a second question. I too am interested in how you broaden this into the public policy world. My day job is working on war and peace and right now we're about to go to war and I'm wondering what I would do if I were talking to a member of Congress. So this is about the public dialogue if you want to respond. I'm very curious, as you said, that there's a process to this and I was reading the paper where you had what a debate is versus a discussion or a dialogue and how you make people do that. How do you get them to change the terms just to talk to each other? As a dialogue coach, get them to stop their normal behaviors of doing, as Melissa said, thinking of the argument and not the follow on to the discussion. Thank you. Anybody else? Hi, my name is Kathleen and this question sort of comes from something that Francis Hogan said where you said you came from a civil rights background and that sort of led you to the pro-life movement and I'm wondering sort of that seems very personal and very how did you, I'm wondering how you let go of your personal or not let go of but how you dealt with your personal views in the midst of this dialogue. How did that happen? How were you able to let go enough to listen? Thank you. Anybody else? Hi, my name is Linda and actually this question was stimulated by something that Melissa said earlier but I'm curious about how the process that you went through in terms of humanizing the two sides the skills that you learned how that whole process affected your roles as activists in your own particular community given that often activist training and experience is meant to divide and to see the world as them and us and that often the tactics and strategies come from that kind of a perspective. How did this process or did this process change your perspectives as activists or change your tactics or strategies as activists? Thank you. Hi, my name is Lily. I was wondering if there were times when differences of opinions came up within each side and how that was discussed or dealt with. Thank you. Okay. We'll have another wave of questions. So be thinking. I should like to learn more. Who would like to start? Well, I don't mind speaking about the words. I think the words were very interesting actually because I think that I often refer to the other side as pro-abortion and I have adopted calling the other side pro-choice even in public. I've adopted using that expression and then we had a big long discussion about what to call what develops inside a woman's womb when she's pregnant. You have to say all those words to say it without using a word that's a hot button. The discussion about that was on Born Child and our friends would have said fetus. So that discussion was very lengthy and we finally came to a compromise which none of us really liked of calling this thing a human fetus because we wanted the humanity involved and they wanted, I think, biological accuracy in terms of calling a fetus. That was another thing. I think that pro-choice friends felt very strongly that they didn't want to be called murderers and I personally had never done that but certainly other people within the pro-life community had used that expression and we certainly agreed to that kind of situation. They agreed to call us pro-life. At least some of them did. Nikki was never happy with that. She can speak for herself. However, I had come to the conclusion that in order to have the conversation, to be at the table and have the conversation, we needed to get past the labels and I was willing to do that in order to have the conversation go forward. So those are just examples, somebody asked about examples of what words we tried to set aside and I think even now in public statements that we see each other making, I think you'll find that that has happened in our public conversation as well as in the private conversation, perhaps with the exception of the human fetus. I think we each use our original words on that. Does anyone else want to respond to that? Well, I think, I guess I would say agreeing to those words or non-use of words was one of the most probably interesting and important things that we actually did. And I would have to say that I think once we were able to agree about what we were going to say and not say, it didn't matter so much whether we said it or didn't say it. And when we slipped, it was not a big deal, but it was really, and it was a very specific kind of focus on what it was that we didn't understand. Why do you care about that? Why don't you want to be called that? What's the matter with that? I mean, that's where we really were, the rubber was really hitting the road on what we meant by focusing on what we didn't understand. And the facilitators had this list on the wall of all these words that were hot buttons and that we should not use so that we could look at them and remind ourselves. The list came from you guys. Yes. Just a comment to follow on those that have gone before me. I actually find the term human fetus a very useful way of thinking about that which is in the uterus. And it works for me better now than terms used to work for me in some ways. On the other hand, the use of the term pro-life to characterize and define those who differ with me on the abortion question was one where I just never could get beyond it because I consider myself pro-life and I consider that a hot button that just profoundly drives me crazy that anyone would think of me as not someone who affirmed life. So I never got there. I was annoyed using the hot buttons that were problematic but I always was looking for ways of describing my three colleagues without having to use that term. I'll just add on to that because I had a slightly different take. It was very hard for me to use the term pro-life just because as somebody that's dealing with the media and writing press releases I was very concerned that we not use that word because it meant that we weren't pro-life but the strange thing is for me, as we were getting to know one another I really started to understand their values in a way that I hadn't before and I began to see the term as kind of descriptive of pro-life at all costs was kind of how I was starting to look at it we would have conversations about what kinds of situations women face and sometimes there are hard decisions and I guess I saw my position as kind of being a public health position where you kind of create options for people to make the best choices possible given the circumstances and that there are other considerations of importance than just life. So we had very interesting conversations and it was kind of how I started to look at it. I guess I'd just like to maybe shift a little bit and comment on the question about how we dealt with our personal views in the midst of the dialogue and I think that it would be important to say that even though we were certainly not debating there were very intense and emotional at times the range of emotion and I think that our own depths of commitment to our personal views on the issue and being in a situation where we were really being challenged to talk about it in a way that was not in this debating style but still in all was in some ways there was I think maybe even deeper anguish and pain. There were moments that were extremely difficult as we, I think particularly as we got deeper into the dialogue and there was an awareness and maybe more I should only speak for myself but I think a little bit also for the pro-life women is that when we kind of came to understanding that our world views were so different and that we were that there were limits I guess to how far we could go with the dialogue and where that would take us I think that was very painful because as Fran said there was still a part probably where the pro-life people were coming in this sense that that there would be let's say at least movement and so that there was I think it's all the more remarkable that we continued at some moments because there was there was so much pain between us at times that the fact that we kept coming back I think is a testament to something I don't know what but it was sort of to a faithfulness anyway and to the real care that we had for one another to carry on because there were times where it would have been a lot less painful to just walk away I wanted to address Susan shares question and I think it actually came up in another question about how we moved beyond the personal and the personal impact on our own lives to thinking about having an impact on public policy or an impact on how others think about this issue and one of the most difficult things that we had to decide over time and sometimes I feel like we talked more about it than we did about abortion was whether we would take the fact of this dialogue public and it was a very complicated and difficult decision because it was going to impact various ones of us in different ways and indeed in ways that might make it hard for us to be leaders in our own particular movements are hard for us to continue certain relationships we had with people who were on our own side so to speak but I think that the fact that we were finally able to take this dialogue public in the Boston Globe article was a real triumph over all of our worst fears and misgivings and I think we have used that departure, that article as a way of then continuing to talk with people like you in settings like this or through other media venues and try to speak to the importance of allowing for real divergence of opinion within an atmosphere of respect and tolerance for those with whom we disagree and I think if anything the model that we're able to present to you this evening and hopefully in many other opportunities will have some impact on people as they think about the world's great divisions that are flying around all over in the Middle East and in our confrontation with Iraq. One of the questions addressed how did it affect our role as activists and I think I mentioned that it certainly affected our rhetoric and that it may even have been unconscious but I think that when we addressed each other through a media forum that we did so with much more respect than we had done initially before the dialogue and I remember that on the first anniversary of the shootings that Nicky wrote an extremely thoughtful and respectful article about the situation. I learned something else that time too because as I said although I work as a chemist to make my money I was a volunteer I was a volunteer president of mass citizens for life and as such I ran the organization and I remember that in response to Nicky's article the young woman who was a very bright young woman wrote who worked for the organization wrote a response to Nicky's article and I had to approve it before it went out and I read the article and I said but Nicky never said those things in the article and she got very upset and said I know what she said I read the article and I couldn't believe it because she was rejecting what she thought Nicky had said but Nicky had not said that in the article and when I brought that up in the dialogue Susan Podziba I remember said that this is a very common phenomenon and something that we really should watch that when we read things that we superimpose our own beliefs on it and not really read what is there and that's what had happened and as I say this is a very bright young woman but she really believed that Nicky had said things they weren't in the article so I would not approve the article it didn't go out the response didn't go out but I just couldn't believe the phenomenon but as I said Susan said that this was something that is quite common and that we really should watch for in ourselves that we don't do it I think it's occurred to me just sitting here tonight that the thing that has changed for me most as an activist is coming to believe that listening is more important than talking that if I'm going to understand how things work and I'm going to understand how things may change I really need to pay a lot of attention to other people particularly people who disagree with me and not believe that by talking myself and trying to get my viewpoint across I'm going to convert people that way and I think that has been a really profound understanding I've come through these dialogues it affects every aspect of my life but certainly most conspicuously maybe my public activities one thing I wanted to respond to was the question about the personal values how difficult that was it was extremely difficult for me with that background the analogy I can make it to me it was as if you had some special gift that you wanted to share with people that you loved you desperately wanted to give it to them whether it be an education for your children or something like that something you wanted to share and to me I had what I believe and I still believe to be the truth and I desperately wanted to share that with people who did not agree with me obviously so that's very very painful and it was very very difficult I am very pleased that Ian is going to just not talk anymore because she's very articulate she's just going to listen from now on I think this will be an improvement I like them all I like them all not to talk because they're all very articulate people no seriously though one of the things I'm an eternal optimist and I think others have said and I have said that we have stood across this chasm however I am I really believe that the truth has a beauty all its own and I do believe that these conversations as they continue will touch people's hearts and I I will probably never give up with the idea that we need to continue the conversation and again I think it's in terms of public policy it's person by person to a great extent you have the conversation that the water cooler and the elevator in your church and your community group at the school board these conversations are very important before this happened I think when anybody mentioned abortion everybody froze no one wanted to say anything in these kind of other groups they were terrified that there would be a screening match we have a key that unlocked that I can't tell you how many professional colleagues after the article appeared came to me and wanted to talk about it they didn't agree with me I have a client who's pro-choice who said to me you are my hero you are my hero I said what? she said well at least we can talk about it and I do think that talking about it is just so important but it does it's very very painful when you love somebody and you care about that person and you have something you want to share with them and then they just don't agree with you it's very painful as Barbara had said just to talk about our very private and personal participation had an impact outside in the world I mean obviously the debate isn't going away each one of us are just as committed to working to on our issue as we were before I actually am incredibly proud to tell all of our supporters and I do it often that I participated in this dialogue and the response has been really great and people think it was really worthwhile and we're glad to see that a leader of an organization they support did this and that's great so the other thing was that the response to the article and even the reporters in the press conference who I have to say are so jaded and don't like covering this issue it was amazing I mean they were they were clearly moved by this as something that was different and important and I do hope by I mean these opportunities that the all forum has offered to come and talk to people I like to snatch up as often as we can because I think it's really helpful to share the experience I hope the ripple effects are that people will think about it and might try it in another venue and the final thing I wanted to say is something I learned from Susan the other facilitator who does negotiation work and she says really stuck with me that a key first step to any negotiation before you even try to come to some mutual agreement about anything is building relationships because otherwise there's no foundation there for anything so part of what I constantly felt or began to feel was kind of a leap of faith that at least we're forming relationships and who knows what could happen but certainly nothing could happen if there were no basis for it so I want to add to Barbara did you were you about ready to no no I guess I wanted to go to the issue of were there differences within the sides because I think that's an astute question and it is a question whose answer is yes I think there were differences within each third of us about things that we thought or perspectives that we had and those were negotiated and discussed within the meetings I think especially from the pro-choice side and I'll let others answer from the other side that there have always been very very deep disagreements among pro-choice people about political strategy and litigation strategy and sometimes I think there was more difficulty between some of us on the same side at least externally and how we were conducting ourselves both in terms of philosophy and political strategy and I think this dialogue was helpful to me not only in getting to know the other side but in becoming really better acquainted with people on my side and that was enormously helpful I just wanted to respond briefly to Susan's second question most about how do you transfer this to other issues and there's no quick answer to that happily our website is full of many materials that will give you some further insight but I would say here I would point to three things the work that happened before the first meeting the whole process of preparing them basically this was a collaboratively designed process there were no surprises they'd all signed on to the same goals agreed to observe the same ground rules they had relationships of trust with me and Susan and that was a key piece I wouldn't underestimate that at all the other things I think were the structure of the opening meetings we had a very hard challenge in four meetings how to bust through a lot of the stereotypes so that in that short amount of time people could see whether or not there was anything they might want to do together I think we have learned that the structure really reduces anxiety there was plenty of anxiety in that room the first few meetings but I would be happy to talk with you afterwards and I'm wondering looking at the time whether there are a couple of more questions or comments at this point about any aspect of this I don't quite understand how you would solve some of the problems if you all everybody agreed to keep the aside like in a strike or any of these legislation that have to have a decision do you want me to respond to that or do you want oh yes okay thank you let's collect the questions sorry if I could try sort of another take on that obviously you've made tremendous progress and probably exceeded the goals that you originally planned for this for this process but it's also where are you going with this do you see somewhere in the future some grand compromise or some other outcome thank you I was wondering whether you could say how these conversations and so on have influenced you to change your outside things what has it done has it changed your approach to the public or whatever in other words you've had many many conversations you've all had personal changes has this affected your policies and how you act let's watch the start oh I'm sorry as I listen to you I realize that until up to now I've had a prejudice in favor of I want to say a product, a consensus in a group if there is true communication I've always believed and I realize you've spoken for a long time and if I were writing this as a novel I would have the six of you do something that you all probably believe on something really meaningful something in contraception we can go to the moon and back but we don't have cheap available contraception and I realize whatever it is you're weaving whatever it is you're crafting is deeper than some kind of a product a consensus an action I don't know what it is but it's wonderful to see my question is different in my own life I've been dealing with things about impulses and anger and as I found that I could let go of the anger then the dialogue could happen but I noticed several of you talked about pain and once I'm wondering how that kind of informs the discussion if you're kind of committed not to pull on one another not to convince but how do you deal with the and does it surface and go away and how does that inform your thinking thank you okay you've got a challenge here we've got about five minutes or so and some very interesting questions on the floor so I I would like to comment on the question about compromise and whether or not we could have a product first of all I think that when the Cardinal and the Governor call for common ground the use of that expression was probably inappropriate in terms of what we were about we were never about common ground we never talked about trying to compromise our positions our principles positions and at least for me in the pro-life ethic there was no way you could possibly compromise that position however we could have a civil public discussion about it we did talk about doing different projects together we really thought we could do something together we could do nothing together except the article which was a long time being born but we really could not agree to do anything public except appear publicly and say we had been together well I wouldn't underestimate that because I think I always said I have nothing to lose in everything to gain by going public but that was not true for anybody else any of the other participants and I have to say one of the most striking and things that I came to respect and honor the most about our friends on the other side was that they slowly but faithfully came to the conclusion that we really must go public and I think that the effort to write the article the effort to do things beyond that is a kind of opening up I'm not sure that we see what's next but we we do try to take opportunities like this one and hope to hear things from all of you about where you might see next steps going that we could respond to I wanted to say a couple of words about solving the problem and about the issue of pain for me it was going to be enough if we decided and agreed that killing people was not a solution to the problem and we had that agreement very quickly and in some ways that that was all I ever hoped for in the process and of course got much more out of it than that and then the question of pain I think is very interesting one my sense is that really good dialogue conversations that take you beyond where you're sitting into a new environment into a new plateau almost invariably involves some pain and that that's perhaps why we don't engage very often in conversations of that magnitude because we're too tired or too interested in avoiding the real confrontation between values or perspectives on values so that I think we learned most perhaps when we were at the greatest pain and that one of the things that we learned is that our relationship was strong enough to cushion the pain I would say also on that question in response in part to the woman who asked it about anger I'm no stranger to anger as everybody here will attest and I think there's a lot of anger in the movement on both sides but I would reckon that is a cover in many cases for pain that anger is an expression of pain rather than something else and we got beyond a lot of the anger a lot of the time to the pain I think that was what we did One comment that I would make around this issue of that we tend to place a very high value on the product and we even debated as we planned the article was people going to say well so big deal so they talked for six years so what's the where's the product where's the compromise where's the thing and I think that if we had been focused on that as an end game to have a compromise or to have some so called common ground we would have missed the richness in the depth of the conversations that did emerge because that would have put us into another whole dimension of a way of talking to one another if we had been sort of in that box of knowing we had to come out with some hard fought compromise and I think it was very freeing for us to be able to be in a conversation that didn't require that that was on something of profound importance to everyone in the room and which also required an enormous amount of trust amongst us which evolved over time in order to have the level of conversation that I think we did have I think it just kept going deeper so I think to say any comment on any other protracted type of disagreement or argument public disagreement that it's unfortunate that sometimes that we don't because there was a need for time in this and that we don't have venues in the time to engage one another in a way that fosters trust and safety so that we can speak about the things that we care most deeply about in the most heartfelt as well as in a thoughtful way, mind and heart so I just think this was an opportunity that while we didn't have that product at the end I think we had you know it was something very rich indeed I'd like to make a comment I think part of the answer depends on what you think words are and whether speaking counts as an action or not. I have a drawer full of tapes of these folks talking on NPR and clippings of Loeb and other articles where they're quoted and they're very different from what else you see in the paper in terms of the distinguishing between the extremes on both sides between acknowledging good intentions and to those to many of those on the other side for avoiding the divisive language and this began I remind you when this started this began at a time in Boston when there was a lot there was shock that this could happen here and there was enormous fear and if you think it matters how we speak to each other and that the quality of the atmosphere in the public square is affected by how we choose to talk with one another in public I would say that this had a very profound effect I would also just say there were some things that didn't happen because of this dialogue there was a hotline aspect to it that was not mentioned tonight but there was information that was exchanged that may have prevented some things from happening so we should wrap up final comments do you want to start off? I don't want to start I'll start thank you all very much for coming and I do want to tell you what Barbara said about the helpfulness of the northeastern student at the beginning of our journey to this building we met a young man and asked him how to get here and he wanted to come with us it was an enormous distance it turns out let me show you I'll come with you but he was very helpful so I just want to thank you and thank the northeastern community are we going in order? no we just want to thank you all for coming and I hope that there's you to think about trying something like this in your own life and that's my interest in speaking about the experience so thank you for having us the one comment I'll make when I began I talked about the fact that I had failed to acknowledge Nikki as a human being on the night this horror occurred sometime later after the dialogue had been going on for quite a while both of us wound up being at the State House at a hearing at the Judiciary Committee I was there and I think on physician assisted suicide at the time and about 12 hours later they were going to debate abortion and as I was walking out I felt somebody pull me by the sleeve like this and I turned around and it was Nikki and I think the message she was giving me was you don't have to acknowledge me here in front of these other people that are on your side she didn't say that and I thought God is the God of second chances this isn't going to happen to me again that no matter what I love Nikki and I wanted to acknowledge her right there in front of everybody I did have some comments later about the fact that I knew Nikki which at the time was not known by anybody except our immediate group how do you happen to know Nikki you know but I thought really and truly that is a result of this and I think it was a very important result for me personally one of the most interesting things and somewhat unexpected things I think Fran mentioned this a little bit earlier but that happened after the publication of the article was that many people shared with us that the conversation about life and abortion was a conversation they never engaged in anymore and as a result of having read the article people were telling me that they were engaged again on this topic excuse me I'm getting sorry there's a doctor in the house I had the occasion to speak to someone after church on Sunday whose husband is a congressman in Washington and I asked about how things were there these days and she said well you know he's a republican and he voted against something and the governor of his state is refusing to appear with him in public because of that vote you know that it's much more jarring and incomprehensible to me that someone would do that and unthinkable that I would do it after this experience I can't imagine saying to someone I won't appear with you because you disagree with me I opened my remarks by I think painting a picture of how frightened and traumatized I was after the John Salve killings and also certainly furiously angry to the point that had Fran tried to be a real human being with me on that evening I wouldn't have been able to accept a gesture I think from her but one of the things that has happened to me in this dialogue is that I have become much less fearful about the controversy around abortion and much less angry and much more contemplative and reflective about it and that certainly has helped me in many aspects of my life and I think it made me a better leader of of Fort Planned Parenthood when I was doing that just to finish up I had to tickle my throat sorry about that but just in terms of the possibilities of conversation on topics that we think are impossible to talk about and I think that those conversations probably stop especially with people we care about in families and among friends where we know we have strong disagreements on certain topics so we just agree not to talk about them anymore and I think that this sort of opens up new possibilities for communicating in ways that we might not have thought possible so it's kind of exciting I thought I would just end by reading the closing words of your wonderful article in this world of polarizing conflicts we have glimpsed a new possibility a way in which people can disagree frankly and compassionately become clearer in heart and mind about their activism and at the same time contribute to a more civil and compassionate society I think that's something not everybody has known or understood and the response these women have gotten when they have spoken in the feedback from the press people who have heard them speak indicates that the fact of being who they are as individuals and as a community has made a difference to a number of people but thank you very much for your attention and your time I feel very fortunate to be one with all of you participating in this program tonight so I thank you all for coming and please join me in thanking Nikki Nichols Gamble, Francis Hogan Melissa Cogut, Madeleine McCommish Barbara Thorpe and Laura Chason