Planned Parenthood, which committed 392,715 abortions in 2022-2023, works hard to deceive women and to hide the truth from them about human prenatal development. Keeping women in the dark makes it easier for women to undergo abortions at Planned Parenthood under the misconception that their children are nothing more than pregnancy tissue — even weeks into pregnancy. When it doesn’t outright lie about fetal development, Planned Parenthood often simply avoids discussing it.
A former staff member once admitted that Planned Parenthood would not provide patients with information on fetal development. “We never discussed fetal development,” she said. “The baby was referred to as the ‘contents of the uterus’ or a ‘clump of cells.’ On the rare occasion a woman asked about the size of the baby, I would tell her it was about the size of the tip of my pencil, regardless of how many weeks into her pregnancy she was.”
A free pass to deceive women for far too long
Following the release of Live Action’s “Baby Olivia” — which uses the same scientifically accurate information distributed by National Geographic in an award-winning prenatal development video created by the Endowment for Human Development — Planned Parenthood executives were forced to do damage control, claiming that “Baby Olivia” (which in some states may be shown in elementary and high schools) is nothing more than “propaganda.”
But taxpayer-funded Planned Parenthood has for too long had a free pass to deceive women who come to their facilities seeking abortions, while lawmakers and their allies at Planned Parenthood instead seek to destroy and shut down pregnancy help centers that are offering women resources to choose life. Live Action’s Medical Misinformation undercover videos highlighted the falsehoods women are being told by the nation’s number one abortion corporation:
The truth is that before the first trimester is even over, a preborn human being is well-developed, with the most rapid development taking place in this span of time. As the Endowment for Human Development notes, “Most significant developmental milestones occur long before birth during the first eight weeks following conception when most body parts and all body systems appear and begin to function.”
Baby Olivia, 11 weeks post-fertilization (13 weeks LMP)
Why Planned Parenthood opposes “Baby Olivia”
When Live Action’s “Baby Olivia” video was released in 2021, it made waves in the pro-life community, but it was in 2024 that the video sent Planned Parenthood’s media spin doctors into a panic. The video was created using the same scientifically accurate human development information from the Endowment for Human Development (distributed by National Geographic). Created as an educational tool, Baby Olivia soon began to be considered for prenatal education in schools — territory that Planned Parenthood has long held, promoting its own questionable form of sex education to children.
In 2024, as Tennessee legislators considered a bill that would allow schools to show students a prenatal development video, Ashley Coffield from Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi attacked “Baby Olivia” as false information that was part of a pro-life narrative to end abortion. She claimed, “Baby Olivia is a fake ultrasound video produced by Live Action, a radical anti-abortion organization, and it parrots the same lies and misinformation that anti-abortion groups and lawmakers use to impose the total abortion ban that we have in Tennessee.”
Likewise, after the Iowa House passed legislation allowing public schools to show Baby Olivia to students, Mazie Stilwell, director of public affairs for Planned Parenthood Advocates of Iowa, called the video “propaganda.” She said, “This video very intentionally misleads the audience by using a dating structure that contradicts what is used in medical practice. They talked about weeks from fertilization rather than the way that pregnancy is actually calculated, which is from the last menstrual period.”
It’s telling that Planned Parenthood’s best argument against Baby Olivia’s validity is that she is aged using the date of fertilization (the date that a human being actually begins to exist) rather than the estimated date of her mother’s last period. ‘Last menstrual period’ — or LMP — dating adds two weeks to the actual age of the child. The Endowment for Human Development itself uses the fertilization date to show the development of the child.
The truth about prenatal development is inconvenient for Planned Parenthood. It shows the humanity of the preborn child and brings the truth to the surface — that preborn children are not mere tissue or clumps of cells. They are human beings, from the moment they begin to exist. Any organization that would seek to withhold this information or deceive the public about prenatal development does not deserve the $700M American taxpayer dollars it receives every year.
Editor’s Note: Read more about Planned Parenthood’s “approved” sex ed (which does not include prenatal development) in Live Action News’ four-part “Selling Sex in Schools” series below:
Selling Sex in Schools: Who’s behind the sex ed being taught to our children?
Selling Sex in Schools: How our children are being groomed for early sexual activity
Selling Sex in Schools: When sex ed is designed with failure in mind
Selling Sex in Schools: Why are population control and eugenics groups funding kids’ sex ed?
