"The quality of age shouldn't be the basis for which someone has personhood status," she answered, noting that the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes the rights of "all members of the human family."
She then addressed the question of the fetus' dependence, arguing that the fetus' greater dependent status as a weaker entity than a baby entitles it to greater, not less, protection. She related this to the story of a friend's husband who, faced with the choice between rescuing a mother or her baby first from the roof of a sinking car, made the "obvious" choice to take the baby.
"Since you believe that we should prioritize weaker and more vulnerable people ahead of stronger people, then shouldn't we actually prioritize the needs of the pre-born child?" she said.
She recalled meeting a Rwandan genocide survivor who, seeing a picture of a child killed in the conflict next to an aborted fetus, pointed to the image of the fetus and said, "That's worse, because at least my family could try to run away."
Considering the concept of perspective, she posed another question: "How can we change our perspective in an unplanned, crisis situation?" She recalled dialoguing with a college student whose stepmother had an abortion upon learning her baby was expected to die at birth. Responding with a thought experiment involving a terminal cancer diagnosis, she answered the student, "Why would we cut short the already short time we have left? Instead, wouldn't we want to savor every moment of every day of the next 20 weeks (of the pregnancy)?"
Moving to her final criterion for what makes a person inspirational – "do the right thing" – she listed a number of circumstances that make pregnancy hard and often lead to abortion, including poverty or rape. But when we look at parents raising an already-born child in the same circumstances, she said, we can see that we ought to have the same attitude towards carrying an unborn child as towards parenting a child in the same situation.
Gray closed with a number of stories from people she knows personally, including a woman who was raped and had a child at age 12, a woman who cared for her baby daughter with respiratory issues, and a woman who regretted her own abortion and ended up counseling another woman to carry her baby to term.
"They're inspiring because they put others ahead of themselves, because they had perspective, and because they did the right thing, even when it was hard," she said of all the stories she had told throughout the talk. "And that's the challenge that I leave all of you with today."
In a question-and-answer session after her talk, she recommended that audience members seek to start dialogue on the difficult topic of abortion with open-ended questions, and to "seek to understand where (another) person is coming from." She also used the analogy of a person choosing rape to address the thought that pro-life views cannot be "forced on" pregnant women, saying that just as it is illegal to make the choice to rape someone, it ought to be illegal to choose to end the life of a fetus.
Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards also gave a Talk at Google, in a video published March 7. Gray's talk, published June 19, had surpassed Richards in views within 24 hours of being uploaded.