Attack on ‘Baby Olivia’ promotes lies about abortion, prenatal development, and sex ed

This week, a writer for the Baptist News Global (BNG) labeled Live Action’s “Baby Olivia” video as misinformation while defending the sexualization of children under the guise of ‘comprehensive sex education.’

Key Takeaways:

• BNG defends the sexualization of children, advocating on behalf of ‘sex-ed’ curricula that promotes abortion, masturbation, pornography and transgender ideology — yet it attacks the use of a computer-animated video showing prenatal human development to students of the same age.

• BNG authors have a history of dehumanizing the pre-born and advocating for abortion.  

• The article’s author claims preborn children do not have beating hearts early in the first trimester, which is false.

• The author also defends failed “comprehensive sex ed” curricula, slams what she terms “abstinence-only” curricula (which is a misnomer), and falsely claims abortion is used to treat ectopic pregnancies.

• Baptist News Global authors have defended abortion several times prior to the attempted discrediting of “Baby Olivia.”

The Background: 

Baptist News Global (formerly known as the Associated Baptist Press Foundation) claims to “pursue truth through responsible journalism” while receiving a third of its funding from the self-described “progressive, inclusive, nonprofit”  Eula Mae & John Baugh Foundation.

This Foundation recently made headlines for giving a nearly $640,000 grant to Baylor University in Waco, Texas, to fund a study on “inclusion and belonging practices” in church congregations for women and those in the “LGBTQIA+” community. After public backlash, the funding was returned by the Christian college.

The Problems:

In her article bearing the ironic title,”The attack on comprehensive sexual education, from federal law to the SBC,” BNG author Mallory Challis labeled Live Action’s “Baby Olivia” video (a high-resolution, medically accurate educational video showcasing prenatal human development) as “misinformation.”

A Never Before Seen Look At Human Life In The Womb | Baby Olivia

Challis based this on the cited claims of pro-abortion groups like SIECUS (the Sexual Information and Education Council of the United States, founded by former Planned Parenthood medical director Mary Steichen Calderone) and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG).

Not a heartbeat?

Regurgitating the claims of pro-abortion groups, Challis tells BNG readers: 

Among a few pieces of misinformation stated in the video, the narrator claims Olivia’s heartbeat can be detected just three weeks into her gestational period. However, OBGYNs say a pulse may be heard in an ultrasound as early as week six or seven of pregnancy. At that point, the heart organ is not yet formed, so the pulse cannot be attributed as a heartbeat (emphasis added). 

1. Three weeks gestation?

No, the narrator does not claim the heartbeat is detected at three weeks gestation. The video uses dating from fertilization (as should be evident when watching the video); three weeks from fertilization is equal to five weeks gestation. The heart begins to beat on day 22, which is the start of week 4 from fertilization; add two weeks to get “gestational age,” which begins — wait for the math — the sixth week of gestation. And yes, this is when ultrasound will begin to detect that heartbeat, because that is when the heartbeat begins.

In other words, there is no misinformation here; there is only the author’s misunderstanding of fertilization age vs. gestational age.

2. No heart/no heartbeat?

This, too, is misleading. ACOG and the media intentionally use deceptive and dehumanizing terminology when it comes to preborn human beings, replacing words like “heartbeat” with terms like “fetal pole cardiac activity” (note the word ‘cardiac’ in this phrase, which refers to the heart), “pulsing cell,” or even “vibrations.” The attempted redefinition didn’t begin until “heartbeat bills” protecting preborn children from abortion upon detectable heartbeat were introduced and/or passed in several states.

In other words, this moving of the goal posts by ACOG is for political reasons, not biological ones.

Prenatal organ development is well-known and documented. In 2019, the National Library of Medicine published a paper on embryonic and fetal development, which stated: 

The human heart is one of the first organs to form and function during embryogenesis. By the end of gestational week 3, passive oxygen diffusion becomes insufficient to support metabolism of the developing embryo, and thus the fetal heart becomes vital for oxygen and nutrient distribution.

The initiation of the first heart beat via the primitive heart tube begins at gestational day 22, followed by active fetal blood circulation by the end of week 4.

The Endowment for Human Development explains that the preborn child’s heart begins to beat at just 3 weeks and 1 day from fertilization, and that by week 4 the heart beats “between 105 and 121 times per minute.” BabyCenter explains that the heart is the first organ to develop and blood begins to pump “quickly because it’s needed to deliver oxygenated blood and nutrients to other developing organs.”

It is plainly visible from the video below from 4 1/2 weeks from fertilization that a two-chambered heart is pumping blood; having all four chambers is not required to have a functioning heart and a heartbeat:

The Beating Heart in Slow Motion: 4 1/2 Weeks Pregnant

Maybe Challis should have taken a look at ACOG’s 2019 ‘early-pregnancy loss’ bulletin, which acknowledged a preborn child’s heartbeat as evidence of life when describing what to look for when there is a suspicion of miscarriage, stating, “Absence of embryo with heartbeat (emphasis added)…” 

Defending Failed Curricula 

Challis also took a swipe at so-called “abstinence-only” curricula, calling it “homophobic” and “medical misinformation” while claiming that students receiving education with comprehensive sex education curricula (CSE) had delayed sexual encounters and are “less likely to contract sexually transmitted infections or get pregnant,” than those educated with “abstinence-only” sex ed programs. However, as Live Action News previously reported:

A [2019] review of 103 studies on comprehensive sex-ed programs in the U.S. and other nations showed that a large percentage of the programs studied led to increases in promiscuity and risky sexual behavior along with their attendant consequences, including “increased pregnancies, STDs, … [number of] sex partners, increases in forced sex/rape, and increases in paid sex.”

None of them reduced STDs or teen pregnancies….

In addition, the Obama-created Teen Pregnancy Prevention Project (TPP) has been shown to be a failure. In 2018, Live Action News noted an HHS spokesperson who stated that, after a five-year evaluation of the program, “Of the 37 [TPP] projects funded and evaluated for a 2016 report, 73 percent had no impact or had a negative impact on teen behavior.”

Sexual Risk Avoidance Education Programs

In an attempt to defend the sexual grooming of children in public schools and to negatively stigmatize any curricula other than CSE, Challis quoted a SIECUS 2025 report in her article which claims that “many states do not require sexual education in schools to be medically accurate” (emphasis added).

Pro-abortion groups and media outlets like BNG often label other programs as “abstinence-only,” which is an inaccurate portrayal. Many states utilize Sexual Risk Avoidance Education (SRAE) programs, which, unlike CSE, do not promote abortions, pornography, or sexual promiscuity. And according to the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), SRAE programs are evidence-based, medically accurate, and age-appropriate, and do not “promote, encourage, or normalize sexual activity outside of marriage” — unlike CSE.  

HHS further notes that SRAE programs teach: 

… the benefits associated with self-regulation, success sequencing for poverty prevention, healthy relationships, goal setting, and resisting sexual coercion, dating violence, and other youth risk behaviors such as underage drinking or illicit drug use without normalizing teen sexual activity.

Mary Anne Mosack, president and CEO of Ascend (an advocate and nationwide servicer of SRAE) refuted claims by BNG’s reporter regarding the effectiveness of CSE programs.

“It is no surprise that after decades of the early sexualization of children by age-inappropriate, ideologically driven, radical sex education that the demand for commonsense, age-appropriate, and biologically sound sex education has never been greater.”

Mosack added that SRAE is “greatly preferred” as its “primary prevention, optimal health model approach to sex education… does not exclude parents/caregivers and offers clarity over confusion for youth coming of age in a time of sexual chaos.” Mosack stated that the use of SRAE programs continues to expand in schools across the country.    

The Root Ideology of CSE

Meanwhile, SIECUS expressed outrage over the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton which allowed states to restrict pornography to adults only; SIECUS fears that CSE might be labeled as pornographic and then restricted in various states — and SIECUS likely should worry, since the root idea of CSE ideology is that “children are sexual from birth,” an idea promoted by “Father of the Sexual Revolution” Alfred Kinsey, whose so-called “research” was obtained from pedophiles who recorded children’s responses as they were sexually molested. When the “science” behind your ideology was sourced from criminals who recorded infants and children jerking, crying, and fainting as “orgasms,” this is reason enough to question your curriculum.

Is Challis aware of these roots of CSE?

It is quite the juxtaposition to laud an ideology that claims children are “sexual from birth” while acting as if a human prenatal development video (showing a child just prior to birth) is somehow offensive. (Notably, SIECUS can’t stand “Baby Olivia” being presented as an option for viewing in schools, either, claiming that such “forced ultrasound videos” will stigmatize abortions.) 

In SIECUS’s line of thinking, students should not view prenatal images of children so that those students might one day more easily kill those humans — yet immediately as they emerge from the womb, those same children are suddenly “sexual.” Of course, this idea is exploited by adults who claim that children are already “sexual” and are therefore not harmed at all when used for a sexual abuser’s own perverse desires. 

And yet, Challis seemingly takes no issue with CSE curricula which encourage abortion, porn, masturbation, and sex with adults. Prenatal imagery = bad; graphic and explicit sex ed encouraging children to view pornography and masturbate = good.

A publication that supports such a worldview should probably drop the veneer of Christianity. The emperor has no clothes.

Misinformation and Anti-Life Values

One other glaringly false claim Challis makes is that abortions are used to treat ectopic pregnancies — which even Planned Parenthood stated (before Roe was overturned) are two different things.

After Roe was overturned, it seems Planned Parenthood decided it didn’t want women to know that treatment for ectopic pregnancy is absolutely not an abortion, and it scrubbed its previous information from its website. Since we know that the overturning of Roe v. Wade didn’t magically change ectopic pregnancy treatments into abortions, it’s reasonable to question Planned Parenthood’s motives for removing this information.

An ectopic pregnancy is when a zygote (a new human life) implants and begins to grow outside of the uterus, most often in a fallopian tube where the preborn embryo cannot survive. This is life-threatening to the mother as well, requiring medical treatment or surgery. The intention is not to kill the preborn child but to save the mother’s life; at this point in time, there is no medical technology that can move the child to the uterus where it can survive and grow.

Unlike a treatment for an ectopic pregnancy, the goal of an induced abortion is to intentionally and directly kill the preborn child implanted inside of the mother’s womb. For those who have suffered the loss of a child in an ectopic pregnancy, such erroneous comparisons are, frankly, offensive. 

Zoom Out:

This is not the first time BNG has presented scientifically incorrect information.

In 2022, BNG Executive Director and Publisher Mark Wingfield compared his experience with natural miscarriage to an abortion (also incredibly offensive to women who have miscarried children), claiming what was lost during an early miscarriage were mere “clumps of cells… building blocks to a future life, not a child.” He concluded that no one knows when ‘life’ begins.

Yet science has already confirmed that a new human organism comes into being at fertilization when the gametes fuse, as James Bopp stated in Human Life and Health Care Ethics, Vol 2:  

The first cell of a new and unique human life begins existence at the moment of conception (fertilization) when one living sperm from the father joins with one living ovum from the mother. It is in this manner that human life passes from one generation to another. Given the appropriate environment and genetic composition, the single cell subsequently gives rise to trillions of specialized and integrated cells that compose the structures and functions of each individual human body.

Every human being alive today and, as far as is known scientifically, every human being that ever existed, began his or her unique existence in this manner, i.e., as one cell. If this first cell or any subsequent configuration of cells perishes, the individual dies, ceasing to exist in matter as a living being. There are no known exceptions to this rule in the field of human biology.

Why It Matters:

Arguing, as many do, that this new, unique, human organism is somehow “not a person” or less human than other humans takes one into dangerous philosophical and moral territory, and it never ends well. There are no humans who are “less human” than others. 

In 2024, BNG told its readers that Christians should support abortions, which author Susan Shaw claimed is “not a sin,” while promoting SisterSong — an organization that labels induced abortion as “reproductive justice” despite the slaughter of generations of Black preborn babies.

And just earlier this month, BNG reporter Steve Rabey attempted to convince readers that the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the advancement of pro-family policies are detrimental to women’s health, stating, “[A]bortion bans already have resulted in higher maternal mortality rates.” Abortion groups often intentionally attempt to misconstrue correlation with causation — but Rabey, without any evidence, directly blames pro-life laws for maternal mortality rates while ironically citing sources which used data from 2015-2018, years before the overturning of Roe v. Wade.  

Challis, however, did get one thing right: Live Action is a “pro-life organization staunchly opposed to abortion in all circumstances,” which believes “abortion is never medically necessary to save a woman’s life.” Live Action holds that position because induced abortions (the intentional, direct killing of preborn human beings) are not medically necessary, and pro-life laws restrict intentional killing.

The Bottom Line:

At best, the ‘reporting’ by BNG is lazy and sorely lacking factual information, and at worst, it is intentional deception. 

Americans and Christians should question the true intentions of any publication or industry which is outraged over the teaching of basic prenatal human development while defending and downplaying the intentional killing of human beings in the womb (far more than clumps of cells) and promoting the distribution of explicit sexual information to children.

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