On January 22, 2025, Live Action founder and president Lila Rose took part in a Georgetown University abortion debate with author and attorney Dr. Mary Anne Franks. The two discussed whether induced abortion — the direct and intentional killing of a preborn child — should be legal. Moderators for the debate were Elizabeth Oliver, President of Georgetown Right to Life (Class of 2026) and Max Wolff-Merovick (Class of 2028).
In her opening statement, Rose said, “The question we are addressing tonight is this: ‘Should abortion be legal?’ Or, to put it more simply, ‘Should murder be legal?’”
“The word ‘abortion’ is a euphemism,” she continued, “And it is surrounded by euphemisms like ‘choice’ or ‘health care.’ But let us speak plainly and define our terms. Abortion is the intentional killing of an innocent human life prior to birth.”
Rose described some of the horrific procedures, noting that they include “poisoning, dismemberment, and burning.”
“These are not medical procedures,” Rose insisted. (See the most common methods of abortion in the video below.)
Rose then laid out the case for the humanity of preborn children and cited staggering statistics on how many preborn humans are killed in the womb via induced abortion. Citing the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, Rose explained how preborn children are protected citizens who should have the same basic human rights as someone who has already been born.
During her opening, Dr. Franks claimed she had once been pro-life but said she changed her mind after her career in law. She denied the humanity of children in the womb, comparing a woman who commits an abortion to a person merely acting in some form of self-defense.
“Let me explain what I mean,” she said. “Laws of self-defense, laws of property, say that the right that we all have, each of us, all of us as individuals, have to protect ourselves against the uses of our bodies or our homes even in some cases, our rights to say no to some of the uses. The idea that we need to consent to some of those uses,” she opined, “that is something that is reinforced by so many aspects of our law.”
She continued to insist that carrying a preborn baby is somehow analogous to someone threatening deadly force upon a woman.
During her rebuttal, Rose pushed back against that argument, saying, “First of all, [Dr. Franks] talked about the law of self-defense as a form of justification for abortion. And I think she described, you know, that if someone is trying to hurt you intentionally, you have the right to fight back and defend yourself,” Rose emphasized. “And the reality is, the child in the womb is not trying to hurt anyone intentionally. The child in the womb is totally dependent on their parents — and ultimately, the child has a right to live as well.”
As the debate continued, Dr. Franks insisted that the preborn child has no rights, and even compared a preborn child to a rapist forcing himself on a woman.
“Why can’t [rapists] just say, ‘I’m borrowing your vagina for however long… nine months,” she suggested. “If that’s how we’re going to do the moral calculus, then why can’t we just say we’re going to borrow your vagina for a while?” She referred to a child’s prenatal development as “womb rental.”
The dehumanizing language Dr. Franks used to describe preborn children is not a new narrative from the pro-abortion side. Live Action News previously reported on a pro-abortion Wisconsin judge who referred to preborn children as “a small group of prenatal cells” in a ruling. In addition, the abortion industry commonly uses terms like “pregnancy tissue” and “products of conception” to describe a preborn child.
Whether you use terms like “group of cells,” or something erroneous like “rapist,” the preborn child is entirely human and has every right to life — and deserves to not be unjustly killed.
Watch the entire debate here.
