Lila Rose Shares How To End Abortion Overnight At YAFCON 2023
TRANSCRIPT
Good morning. How’s everybody doing? Good. Good, good. Well, I’m on California time, so this is very much morning for me. I think it’s 6 AM, bright and early. I flew in on Wednesday, got in late, and went right to Timcast. Does anybody watch Timcast? Timcast IRL. Well, it was fun.
So we got to the studio, and many of you guys might know this, but Tim used to be– well, he still calls himself, I think–a classical liberal, but he used to be very liberal. And that included being very pro-abortion.
So I’m sitting here at this table with him and his co-host during the podcast, and one of the guys says, “Oh, we don’t know that it’s a human life. There’s no way to tell that it’s a human life because it’s just a cell.” A baby, basically. We’re talking about when does life begin, he’s saying, “It’s just a cell at the beginning, and that looks like any other cell in your body, so you can’t really distinguish between the two.”
Okay, hopefully everyone listening to this is like realizing this is not a good argument. And Tim, the former pro-abortion, very liberal host, he used to work for Vice News, he says, “That’s stupid, it obviously is a human.” And I smiled thinking that our movement, the pro-life movement, even among many liberals today, even among many people on the left who are joining the pro-life movement, realize that it is stupid to say “we don’t know when life begins.”
Life clearly begins at the first moment of our beginning as scientists can find it, which is that moment of fertilization at sperm-egg fusion. So we have this beautiful truth, we have this beautiful truth, that I believe when we are willing to share it and speak it, people acknowledge it, many people come to acknowledge it. And surprisingly, as I continued the conversation with Tim, again, this former very liberal guy, he was very pro -life and kept saying that “it is murder, abortion does kill.”
And I just thought, “Wow, we’ve done our job here.” All of these people are getting more and more “pro-life-pilled,” I’m gonna call it. That’s the most important pill I think you can take.
They’re getting more and more pro-life-pilled because the facts, and the truth, is getting out there. During World War II, quick trip back in history here, the Allied forces were able to come together to defeat one if not the greatest force of evil, the Nazis in Germany, because they unified. Because they got together with unity, and they decided that, together, they would face and conquer their shared enemy.
And because of their courage and unity, we are now still free. We are still free. I think sometimes it’s easy to forget that that was literally a couple generations ago, that the world was under threat from a savage regime that wanted to destroy, ultimately people that they saw as unfit, and that they wanted to take over the United States and every nation in the world.
And Winston Churchill said that when he was one of the Allied power leaders that has gone down in history as one of the commanding voices that helped the Allies have the courage to fight and win, he said, “When there is no enemy within, when there is no enemy within, the enemy outside cannot hurt you.”
My purpose this morning is to have us join together in unity to face the enemy outside, and that unity that we must share is two-fold. As conservatives, as people who care about our country, liberty, the future, there are two core things that I believe we must unite on: First of all, that life is fundamental and the first fundamental human right. Life comes first. And we must be a civilization that defends that first human right, which is life.
Secondly, there’s another piece to it. Okay, so we can protect life. Let’s say life is protected in this country. Will we have a thriving society? Will we have a just and good society? The second thing that any civilization must have at its foundation to thrive is love. It must be a civilization of love. And by a civilization of love, I mean a civilization of prospering marriages and families. If we don’t have that, we don’t have a country.
And sometimes this is more difficult to talk about because it’s easier in a way to talk about the hard political issues, about liberty, about foreign affairs, about immigration. All of those things matter. They matter greatly. But if we don’t get life right, if we don’t get protecting the fundamental first human right to life right, and if we don’t get the family right, if we don’t have a society conducive to fostering marriage and family, then any other rights that we would like to enjoy will be lost. And that’s why we must be unified to defend these beautiful things, life and family, life and love in order to face the ideological enemies that oppose us. I wanna start by talking about some of the lies about life and love, and the solution to those lies.
So first of all, life. Many of you know my work at Live Action. Live Action is the global leader right now in education for the pro -life movement, which is a pro-love movement too.
But first, it demands: stop the killing. Stop the killing of the most vulnerable, vulnerable humans who have that first right, which is life, like you and me, we have this right.
This right doesn’t begin at birth. It begins at the first moment of our existence as human beings. And our Declaration of Independence says very clearly, the document that declared what this country was to be founded upon, that “we are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights. And among these are life.” Life comes first. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But life comes first. I want to tell you a story that happened just recently in my home state of California.
A woman chose to undergo surrogacy. She chose to be a surrogate, meaning she chose to effectively rent her womb to others to bring a life into the world. This woman’s name was Brittany Pearson. Brittany is a mom, a young mom. She has other children as well. And she chose to undergo surrogacy for two men, a gay couple. Brittany Pearson was about 24, 23 weeks pregnant when she discovered that she had cancer and she needed to undergo cancer treatments. And she didn’t want to put the baby’s life at risk because chemotherapy and other treatments could be harmful to the developing baby and her womb.
So, she contacted the two parents, the two men, and she said, “I would like to find a way to bring this baby earthside safely. I would like to find a way to deliver this baby soon. It would be a preemie, but we could care for this baby in the NICU and make sure that this baby is safe.”
And the two men said, because it was their contracted right in the state of California, said, “No. We don’t want to deal with a NICU baby. They have health issues sometimes. We don’t want to do this.” And so Brittany said, “Okay, well, I’ll adopt the baby or I’ll find someone to adopt the baby.” Because they said, “Well, you should just abort.” And she said, “No, I’m not going to abort. I don’t want to do that.” And they said, “That’s our DNA”, at least one of the man’s DNA, because it takes a man and a woman to create a child. But one of the men said, “That’s my DNA. I don’t want that DNA out in the world.” And so they demanded that Brittany have the abortion. She refused, but she ultimately would deliver that baby at 25 weeks old–babies can be born and survive as young as 21 weeks and five days–this baby was 25 weeks old. This little boy. Delivered this baby in a California hospital and because of the demands of the parents, this baby was left to die.
Infanticide and abortion go hand in hand. The disrespect of the child when the child is seen as a commodity, the child is seen as property that adults believe they have a right to, a child they’re going to use reproductive technology and pay some money to create a life and they have the power to bring life and end life. This, this is the understanding of many people today. We have that power, we get to do that. It is the power for us to choose.
And so we have this case. Do I think Brittany had a responsibility? Yes. I don’t think it’s just these two men that were the murderers in the situation, and the hospital staff that stood by while a brand new baby boy struggled to breathe. I think it’s also the fault of men and women. Together, we share responsibility. We share a responsibility together, whether it’s renting our wombs, whether it’s allowing an abortion industry that commits abortions, whether it’s a state like California that last fall passed Proposition 1 that permits abortion through all nine months of pregnancy for any reason.
You see, when we don’t protect the first human right, when we savage our most vulnerable, ultimately the lines quickly become blurred. What is the difference after all? Between killing a baby, moments before birth, weeks before birth, or delivering a baby alive and neglecting and abandoning it until that baby dies. Same baby, same age, different method of killing.
If we continue to allow this horror, if we continue to set it aside as just another political issue, as just another social issue for some crazy pro -lifers who are so passionate and everyone else…
“We’ll just kind of let the pro -lifers do their thing and we’re gonna go on about our life, we will never have justice in this country.” Because if we do not treat the most vulnerable with justice, there is no justice for anyone. We are defined as a nation, as a society, by how we treat the weak. There are 2 ,500 abortions every single day in this country.
Even with the fall of Roe v. Wade, which was a tremendous victory, it was a tremendous victory, and there have been over 25 ,000 lives directly saved because when Roe was passed, when Roe fell, when Roe v. Wade fell because of Dobbs v. Jackson, laws passed throughout the country, trigger laws in states that protected life. And because of those abortion bans, over 25,000 children have been born that would have been killed otherwise.
So that in and of itself is a tremendous victory. But the fight is on. The fight is on. And so we must speak with one voice as a conservative movement, as a movement of values, as a movement of liberties to say, “Liberty for all, not just some. Justice for all, not just some. And our most vulnerable deserve it most.” You might hear from people on campus, you know, people that are, either they think they’re pro -choice or they say they’re pro -choice, and they might give you all kinds of justifications for abortion. And I want to address this briefly, because you’re gonna find this. You’re gonna find this. If you come out and speak about how we should ban abortions, how all human lives deserve protection, you’re gonna face some blowback. But it’s important that we are equipped with facts to counter the lies.
And so some of these facts include the basic facts of fetal development. It’s amazing. The podcast I was on, Timcast, the gentleman that was commenting didn’t understand the difference between a sperm cell, an egg cell, and a single cell embryo. This fundamental difference. Now why would someone so intelligent–because he was an intelligent person–not understand that basic distinction? That when you have a single cell embryo, that’s a unique individual human life that just needs time and nourishment with this complete unique individual DNA that just needs time and nourishment to grow.
A sperm cell and egg cell – one of my skin cells, is never gonna grow into a person. It’s never gonna grow into an adult one day, obviously. It’s not an individual human life. We know when life begins, all scientists and biologists agree. Even pro -abortion scientists agree and acknowledge, you know, reluctantly, yes, it’s a human at the first moment of fertilization.
Now they might say, well, it’s a human, but it’s not a person. It doesn’t have rights. But the creed of human rights is that human rights are for all humans, not just a group of humans that you consider persons. If you are human, you are a person, and you deserve the rights that everybody else has. And that child deserved those rights from the beginning. And so I want to share some quick statistics with the time I have before talking about the culture of life, love, and the civilization of love.
So first of all, fetal development–it’s important that we have these facts. The heart is beating for a child at just three and a half weeks. Isn’t that incredible? A heartbeat can be detected as early as six or seven weeks in pregnancy. Brain waves are already happening and detectable as early as seven weeks.
By the end of the first trimester, between 12 and 14 weeks, the child’s body is fully formed and just needs time and nourishment to grow and start to operate. But you have a brain, you have all of the body parts, you have the arms and legs, you have the face and the facial features. It’s incredible how quickly human development happens. And when you see human development and show human development to others, it makes it a lot harder to defend abortion. Because we instinctively know when we see, this is a human life. And human life is precious. Human life is sacred.
I want to share with you a short video here about the origins of human life. This is a video that Live Action worked on with world -class illustrators, animators, and medical experts. It is the most lifelike description of life in the womb. Has anyone seen Baby Olivia? Okay, there’s a few of us, awesome. This video has been viewed, I think we’re at over 50 million times online. And it’s continuing to grow. It’s now going to be in all classes in the state of North Dakota. We’re getting it in other classrooms and courses.
But when you learn about the origins of human life, it’s much harder to defend human destruction. So let’s play Olivia now.
Undeniably human and undeniably beautiful. The pro-life case in a nutshell is very simple. I want you guys to remember this logical syllogism when you’re going to have conversations about this issue or you’re maybe defending the pro -life point of view online and it’s this: It’s always wrong to intentionally take an innocent human life.
It’s always wrong to intentionally take an innocent human life. Who here agrees with that? Great, we’re in good company. But guess what? Most people on the left agree with that too, that it’s always wrong to intentionally take an innocent human life.
The next premise in the syllogism: abortion is the intentional taking of an innocent human life. Abortion is the intentional taking or killing of an innocent human life.
Want to know what an abortion is? Go watch abortionprocedures.com. They’re medical animations, but every abortion is designed to do one thing, kill a child. Not just terminate a pregnancy, but kill the child. Remember, in the case of those two men, they didn’t just want her to terminate the pregnancy and deliver the baby. They wanted that baby dead. Abortion is about “we want to end not just the pregnancy, but the life of this child.” And every abortion procedure is designed to kill an innocent human life. And so the conclusion of the logical syllogism is this: Abortion is always wrong. Abortion is always wrong. That preborn child has the same moral status as a born child. They are the same, scientifically, biologically they are the same, morally they are the same.
Your being born doesn’t give you human rights, your humanity gives you human rights. And abortion is devastating. It’s devastating for our culture because it tells us that we as women are burdened by children, that children are not a gift, that they are a threat, that children are this negative thing that happens as opposed to the future. And that’s what I want to address next. Civilization of love.
How do we build a civilization of love? How do we get to the crisis of abortion? How did it happen that we have 2 ,500 children being killed every single day in this country? If we change the way that we view sex and love, we could eradicate abortion almost overnight. If only people who loved each other, were committed to each other, and were open to having kids together were the ones being intimate and having sex together, then there would be no more abortion. Think about that. It’s adult human behavior that has created the abortion crisis. It’s our choices as adults.
Our desire and our demand to say we want to have sex without responsibility, that we don’t have any responsibility, that the only morality around sex is consent… Just consent and that’ll be enough.
But that’s not the truth. A civilization of love recognizes that the bond between a man and a woman, that the harmonizing of a man and a woman and their ability to create life together in the amazing and sacred institution of marriage is what sets up every family and every child for success. And it’s beautiful.
I want to share one more video from Live Action that gives an approach to this topic in a fun way. After the fall of Roe v. Wade, when Roe v. Wade fell, there was a lot of commentary going around. People were saying, “I’m going to get a vasectomy because now abortion is illegal.” Or women would say, “I’m going on a sex strike.” There was kind of some very leftist women who went out on Twitter and started a campaign about how they were going on a sex strike.
And then a lot of conservatives responded and said, “Great. That’s great.” Because basically they were saying, “If I can’t use abortion as backup contraception, then I’m not going to have sex.” If anything, besides the saving of the lives that Roe v. Wade‘s fall did, it helped reaffirm chastity, abstinence, and the beauty of the thing, right? So this video is a bit tongue -in -cheek, but it’s based on true circumstances and events. Another Live Action production. You can play the video Dark Times now.
Okay, so I only have a little time left, but listen, I’m just gonna talk very frankly here about the civilization of love and sex. There is a lot of chaos right now in the dating world. Raise your hand if you think dating today is hard and crazy and annoying, okay. We mostly agree, a couple hands didn’t go up, that’s good, there’s some hope here. But the reality is, divorce rates are high, fewer people are getting married, far fewer people are expressing that they are happy, there’s skyrocketing rates of mental illness, there’s skyrocketing rates of single parent family homes, 9 out of 10 women who have abortions are unmarried, 9 out of 10 women who have abortions are unmarried.
There is chaos when it comes to love and sex today. And so my challenge for the conservative movement and for us is this: to not be afraid of talking about sexual ethics, to be committed to living as best we can ourselves, to be ourselves, to be committed and passionate about marriage, make marriage great again, celebrate marriage again.
I’m almost five years married, so I am not an expert in marriage, but I can say this: marriage has been the greatest blessing of my life besides my faith. The marriage to my amazing husband – and it was his values and his virtue, it was his commitment, and it was his mastery of himself, his self-control and his drive to do good things for the world and want to be a good father one day – that deeply attracted me to him.
And I’m gonna say there’s probably a lot of people in this room that would hope to get married one day. Or maybe you’re wrestling with feelings, mixed feelings about marriage because of your parents’ marriage or just what you see about marriage and the culture, but I wanna tell you two things: Marriage is amazing. It is beautiful. It is possible. No matter what your history has been, no matter what families you come from, marriage can be amazing when it is between two people who have committed to each other, who are living and sharing values and virtues, who want to build the most amazing project that you can build, which is a family, and be open to the children that may come from that beautiful union.
So don’t give up on marriage. And then the second thing: let’s practice responsibility.
Let’s practice sexual respect and responsibility. We have the power. You know, I get in debates a lot online with red-pillers, the dating red-pillers, who say that, you know, men can’t be monogamous. It’s impossible for men to be monogamous. That’s not true. It’s a lie. I know amazing married family men who are passionately faithful and women who are passionately faithful. Fidelity is possible for everyone. Fidelity and authentic love is possible for everyone. So fight for that. Pursue that and be unabashed about wanting that in a partner and a husband or wife one day.
Be proud of wanting that in a husband or a wife one day. I believe that if we can build strong marriages, strong families, and if we can demand justice for all, not just some, but that first human right for all, and make that our primary focus when it comes to voting in the voting booth, that yes, other issues matter a lot, but if this politician is not going to stand up for life unapologetically and complete protection for the preborn unapologetically, then we have a problem with that. We need to be unapologetically and unabashedly pro-family and pro-life.
It is the only way forward. Remember, if we have unity within, our opposition cannot win because we have truth on our side, because we have truth and goodness on our side. So let’s be unified in our love and our fight for life and for family.
Thank you all so much.