Lila Rose, founder and president of Live Action, appeared on an episode of Jubilee’s Surrounded on Sunday to debate 25 pro-abortion activists. During the episode, Rose made three pro-life claims that pro-abortion activists attempted to debunk regarding induced abortion — the direct and intentional killing of a preborn human being.
Claim #1: Abortion leaves women scarred for life.
During this portion of the debate, a pro-abortion activist named Julia challenged Rose’s claim, arguing that “life is permanent, and so by not allowing women to have an abortion, you’re basically saying you have to have this permanent being that exists in the world.”
But as Rose noted, physical life is not permanent; death, however, is. She added that this fact of choosing death for one’s own child is what leaves a scar.
Anniversary reactions
“And that’s what a lot of women struggle with, especially on the anniversary of when that baby would have been born. I’ve talked to hundreds, just personally, but there are thousands and millions more out there on the anniversary of when that baby would have been born – one, two, three, four years old, there’s deep regret and pain and some struggle with mental illness afterwards or other struggles or they have fertility issues,” said Rose.
Suicidality
“There have been several studies done that show that women have higher suicidality who have abortions than the women that give birth. There’s a California study which is 200,000 Medicaid patients, 150% more likely to commit suicide if they had an abortion than if they had given birth.”
Rose also shared two studies out of Finland which revealed that women who had abortions had a higher likelihood of committing suicide than women who did not have abortions. “Women deserve to know this,” Rose said.
Claim #2: Abortion cannot be justified under any circumstances.
Rose argued that induced abortion is never justifiable.
Miscarriage treatment and emergency preterm deliveries are not induced abortions
A young man named Alex told Rose the story of a Florida woman whose water broke at 16 weeks of pregnancy. Alex claimed the woman went to the ER, which turned her away, saying she was going to lose the baby — but if they gave her any treatment it would be an abortion. The next morning, she began bleeding heavily. Alex said the woman was operated on for eight hours and miraculously, she survived.
Rose explained, “… If this was a miscarriage, the baby was dead; it was medical malpractice for the emergency room to turn her away and she would have had a lawsuit against them in any pro-life state in the country. Any kind of care for miscarriage to complete a miscarriage if the baby had passed away is completely legal and that’s actually written in the books. So I think that’s a really important point — that medical malpractice unfortunately does happen…”
Standard treatment for preterm premature rupture of membranes (PPROM) does not include induced abortion, in which the intent is to end the life of the baby. In some cases, doctors can stitch the cervix closed (cerclage) and attempt to delay labor from starting. If a preterm delivery must take place, this is not an induced abortion; the intent is not to kill the baby.
Euphemisms and obfuscation
Another abortion supporter named Dana, the director of a rape crisis center, debated Rose. At one point, Rose asked her, “What is an abortion?”
Dana: “[Abortion is] an actual medical procedure to remove tissue from your body…”
Rose: “What kind of tissue is being removed in an abortion?”
Dana: “Fetal tissue.”
Rose: “Of a what?”
Dana: “A fetus.”
Rose: “What kind of fetus? What is a fetus?”
Dana: “A fetus could grow to be a live birth.”
Rose: “So is the fetus alive?”
Dana: “Could be.”
Rose: “If the fetus is dead, why do you need an abortion?”
Dana’s euphemisms and obfuscation points to the refusal of pro-abortion advocates to truthfully discuss abortion. Instead of acknowledging what a human fetus is — a human being — they use euphemisms to dehumanize the living, developing human in the womb. If the preborn child were not alive, he or she would not be growing, changing, and developing.
Rape survivors and their babies deserve care
Next to debate Rose was Ceci, who is recognizable as having been an audience member during Rose’s 2022 appearance on The Dr. Phil Show. As she did on the Dr. Phil Show, Ceci accused Rose of having “no empathy” for victims of sexual assault — and implied that Roe knew the story of a 10-year-old incest survivor, though details were not specified. Ceci claimed Rose was “affording more empathy toward a zygote, more than you are a living, breathing 10-year-old who just went through something seriously traumatizing. So, your empathy is in a place I don’t understand.”
Rose responded, “Incest is absolutely horrific. We are completely aligned on that. We need more penalties for abusers….” She added, “In the case of incest and there’s a new life that’s been conceived, there’s another human being now we’re talking about. It’s not just the abuser and the victim. There’s another potential victim and we need to care for both…. There are rights now in play for an unborn child and a born child. They both have rights, and I think the medical care is very key, as well as the counseling and the support that she deserves, and probably an early delivery would be necessary to protect her health and to make sure that the baby would have a chance to live.”
Rose summed up, “But at the end of the day, you don’t give the death penalty to the baby.”
Claim #3: Every unborn child has the right to life.
Rose argued that every preborn child has the right to life, which only one person initially attempted to counteract — a man named Adam.
All humans have human rights
“Why do you think that a fetus at 10 weeks, eight weeks for example, that has no capacity to be self-aware, to experience pain, or anything else should be valued equal to the bodily autonomy of a woman?”
Rose replied by asking him if a human fetus is a human. He said it is.
“So your argument is that some humans don’t have human rights — because my argument is that every human has a human right and that first right is life,” said Rose.
Adam argued, “This is getting into semantics, like the colloquial way we use the word ‘human’ versus maybe a more scientific way, so obviously a fertilized egg and beyond has human cells. The question is, when we talk about protecting that life, when does it become on the same level as the life of the mother who has bodily autonomy?” Then he claimed that “22 weeks” is when the preborn child is on the same level, “because again, prior to that, there’s nothing there. The car is on but there’s no driver in the car — and you don’t apply traffic laws to an empty car, right? There has to be a subject present. It can’t be a something. It has to be a someone.”
Adam defined human life as “the ability to have a subjective experience.”
Rose asked, “So if someone is unconscious, are they no longer a human?”
Adam argued that even if a person is in a coma, he would still have the neural pathways connecting those parts of the brain that he feels are necessary to make someone a human.
Rose asked, “And why, for you, does that give that person human rights?”
Adam replied, “Because that includes anyone we’d want to include.”
Rose asked him about individuals who are born missing those brain connections, and Adam appeared to believe they would still be humans despite the lack of those brain connections.
But then, Adam jumped to a different argument entirely, claiming he was talking about personhood, not whether a fetus is a human life. He then changed course again to focus on bodily autonomy, claiming that the conflict between bodily autonomy and the life of the baby is what makes abortion acceptable, but claimed this conflict does not exist after the diagnosis of a condition such as anencephaly.
“The reason you’re doing an abortion is not like, ‘Oh I want to kill this fetus for fun.’ There’s conflict between the woman’s bodily autonomy and the fetus developing. If there’s some way to resolve that and respect both parties that would be great, but we don’t have that kind of medical technology.” He said resolving the conflict of bodily autonomy is why a preborn baby can be killed before ‘viability’.
Rose responded that his argument infers that developmental ability is what determines a person’s value. She also explained that bodily autonomy does not extend to a false right to kill another human being.
What an abortion actually is
Then another debater named Whitney sat opposite Rose, arguing, “My bodily autonomy is paramount, is the most important thing — and to say that women’s bodily autonomy should be sacrificed for a hypothetical baby, a hypothetical child? Because a pregnancy that is not a child, it’s a baby, it’s a fetus and it’s an embryo.”
She then claimed that the right to life of the preborn child is equal to her bodily autonomy but the child doesn’t have the right to use her body without her consent.
Rose explained, “An abortion is the intentional killing of that child,” and Whitney countered by claiming that was only ‘Rose’s definition’ of abortion, and that abortion is actually nothing more than a “medical procedure.”
Rose explained, “So, an abortion involves either poisoning the baby to death via an abortion pill; it involves functioning the baby to death in a first trimester abortion; it can involve live dismemberment of that baby in a second trimester abortion; or in a third trimester abortion, involves a lethal injection.”
Final debate
The debate concluded with Rose choosing a pro-abortion activist to debate for 10 minutes on a claim of their choosing. Rose chose Dana, the director of the rape crisis center, because she didn’t feel their conversation was complete.
Dana claimed that bodily autonomy is the “prevailing right” in the abortion debate.
Rose explained:
There’s a very unique relationship when a woman is pregnant with another human life with another body — and that’s her son or her daughter, whether she wanted to get, intended to get pregnant. When she’s pregnant, there’s that unique relationship that springs into existence with the existence of that new human life. And a few times it’s been said today, ‘Well the science doesn’t matter.’… The science does matter a lot because science can help tell us what is real and what is not real, and science does tell us when human life begins and it doesn’t magically begin at birth. Human life begins before birth, and human life begins at the moment of fertilization.
I’m all for bodily autonomy. I believe that our bodily autonomy as women ends where another human being’s life begins.
Dana, however, explained that she had an abortion herself because she had a young son with autism and didn’t want another baby. She called her preborn child “a mass of cells.”
“I need you to understand that it wasn’t about, ‘What am I killing?’ What am I keeping alive?’ It was about what was best for my body,” said Dana.
Innate human value
Rose responded:
When you talk about your baby and you saw that baby as ‘a clump of cells,’ you said it wasn’t a baby to you, it wasn’t a child and you had that abortion. You have no regrets.
Our feelings or our beliefs about other people don’t change that other person, that other human’s value. So I could have feelings about my son, about a person I walk past down the street, about anybody in this room, but that doesn’t change whether they — good feelings, bad feelings, good beliefs, bad beliefs — that doesn’t change that person’s innate human value.
And they have innate human value — not because of their capacities not because of their abilities, but because of their innate human nature that we all share. And human nature doesn’t start at birth, doesn’t start a few weeks or even a month before birth. It starts at the beginning of a human person’s life, which is fertilization.
A just society
Rose continued:
It’s incredibly important for rule of law, for justice, for human rights, that we are especially careful to protect the rights of those that were dependent and weak. Because if we live in a society that just says the strong get to choose what they want because they can, that’s not a just… society and that’s why I’m so pro-life.
I’m so pro-life because that baby… they’re totally dependent on the mother. They’re completely unable to defend themselves, speak for themselves, and that’s all the more reason why we, as a civil and just society, should care about their right to live, and by the way, help that mother. … You can’t just care for the baby and not care for the mother.
Rose argued that Dana’s position that babies in the womb are just ‘clumps of cells’ is a dangerous one.
“This is very dark, because you’re saying if a woman is pregnant and her boyfriend slips drugs into her drink to force an abortion on her, she wants to have this baby, he puts drugs in her drink. Would you say that there should be no penalties for that man and what he did to her?”
Dana maintained that there should only be penalties for what he did to the “tissue” of that woman’s body, saying, “that child does not have rights.”
However, in some states, men have been charged with homicide or attempted homicide and sentenced to prison time for slipping abortion drugs to pregnant women. Homicide charges are brought against perpetrators who kill other human beings — not against those who merely dispose of “tissue.”
Tell President Trump, RFK, Jr., Elon, and Vivek:
Stop killing America’s future. Defund Planned Parenthood NOW!
