It seems the recent uproar from the abortion industry and its friends in the media over legislation requiring the viewing of a computer-generated fetal development video in some public schools wasn’t enough. Now, an article in The 19th has taken the hyperbolic hand-wringing to a whole new level.
The article begins with an ominous tone: “Aftyn Behn hoped that this would be the year the Tennessee legislature was free of bills related to the anti-abortion movement. Since it is now illegal to terminate pregnancies in the state, the Democrat figured her Republican counterparts in the Tennessee House would concentrate their efforts on causes other than restricting reproductive rights. But she was mistaken….”
“I’ve been in the trenches fighting against anti-abortion legislation and policy for a long time, and I really just thought this year that they could just let it go,” Behn added, according to The 19th. “And it just continues to get worse…” (emphases added).
One would think that legislators had introduced something absolutely dastardly and inappropriate for the eyes of young children — like some sort of sex ed from Planned Parenthood — but no! Seeing a clear gap in the educational system regarding facts about prenatal human development, legislators in various states have introduced bills named after Live Action’s groundbreaking “Baby Olivia” video, which Behn claims has a “nefarious” tone.
Does this look like “nefarious propaganda” to you?
The pro-abortion media has become fond of painting the computer-generated video as “propaganda” (a term which has come to mean anything the abortion industry worries might portray life in the womb as something more than a parasitic clump of cells). But in reality, the video walks viewers through the life of a human being from the moment of fertilization to just before birth.
Though many social media influencers and media outlets have made eye-rolling statements like, “We watched this video so you don’t have to,” I’d encourage you to spend three minutes of your life watching the completely non-threatening and family-friendly video for yourself below:
Well, if you survived the viewing experience without an explosion of misplaced anger, you may be asking, “So, what’s the big deal?” According to Behn, who — again — believes the video is “nefarious”: “The intention of this video is to show any kids who might be pregnant in the school system that the fetus is living and breathing, and that they’re better off keeping the baby.”
So that’s the real issue here.
Here’s what’s going on: 1) the abortion industry and its friends in the media don’t like that the video was made by a pro-life group and might make its way into schools to show children that when a woman is pregnant, she’s pregnant with a human (this is seen as being emotionally “manipulative”), and 2) medical practitioners who are either directly involved with abortion or who profit from abortion in some way have called the video “misleading” because it counts the age of the human being from fertilization to the end of pregnancy instead of counting two extra weeks from the woman’s last menstrual period (when the preborn human being doesn’t yet exist). When doctors discuss pregnancy, they typically start counting weeks at the woman’s last menstrual period, not at the beginning of fertilization (when a new human life begins). And therefore, even though it makes perfect sense to count from the moment of a human being’s existence for the purposes of a human prenatal development video, pro-abortion “experts” have claimed this misleads people about human development.
Those two points, in a nutshell, are what every pro-abortion expert and media outlet have stated in objection to the video.
You can read more here about the well-documented developmental milestones mentioned in the video — everything from fertilization, to heartbeat, to first trimester development, second trimester development, and beyond. You can also read the sources utilized for the video.
The 19th quotes Mazie Stilwell, director of public affairs for Planned Parenthood Advocates of Iowa, who reiterates the idea that “major medical organizations” oppose “this propaganda” because it “talk[s] about weeks from fertilization rather than the way that pregnancy is actually calculated, which is from the last menstrual period.”
And according to The 19th, “Stilwell said the video sensationalizes gestures, such as hand clasping or thumb sucking, that fetuses make.”
Stop the presses.
Fetuses have hands?
And they can clasp their hands?
They have thumbs?
And they can suck their thumbs?
Yes — to all of the above. How many students are likely to know that at just six weeks after fertilization (gestational week 8, for the objecting medical professionals out there), the preborn human’s hands have already appeared? Or that just nine weeks after fertilization (gestational week 11), that human being can suck his thumb? And that same week, as the Endowment for Human Development (EHD) says, the “fetus now sighs, stretches, moves the head, opens the mouth, and moves the tongue.”
When facts about prenatal development are inconvenient
In other words, before the first trimester is even over, that preborn human being is developed enough to have a beating heart, distinct fingers, a tongue that can move, cerebral hemispheres and brain waves, and more. EHD 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.”
The 19th claims that Stilwell said the point of the video “is to manipulate and appeal to a young audience.”
Does it seem more than a little ridiculous that presenting actual facts about actual human beings in the womb is now considered manipulation? Maybe it’s not so ridiculous, since this is coming from the same crowd who believes showing a woman a prenatal ultrasound is tantamount to torture.
The 19th chose Heather Corinna, a former abortion clinic employee, as another of its “experts” to give comment on “Baby Olivia.” She told the outlet that the three-minute computer animation is “produced like political propaganda” — whatever that means — and adds, “They say they can recognize lullabies and stories. No one can do a test on someone in utero to find out if they recognize something; that’s not a thing. It’s sheer projection.” But Corinna is mistaken.
The “Baby Olivia” video states, “She can recognize her parents’ voices, and will even recognize lullabies and stories” approximately 27 weeks after fertilization (again, that’s 29 weeks gestation for the skeptics). According to that known purveyor of of propaganda, the Mayo Clinic, “By the end of the 25th week of pregnancy — 23 weeks after conception — your baby might be able to respond to your voice with movement.” Researchers have also seen children in the womb responding to music by moving their mouths and tongues. EHD cites multiple studies done as far back as the 1980s and 1990s, showing that “The fetus hears numerous sounds before birth, with the mother’s voice and heartbeat dominating other sounds. Studies show that after months of listening to the mother’s voice, the newborn prefers her voice to any other. The newborn also prefers female voices to male voices and familiar lullabies heard before birth to new lullabies after birth. Newborns can distinguish prose passages heard during the last 6 weeks of pregnancy from new passages, providing additional evidence of in utero memory formation and learning.”
In other words, this in-utero research about the development of human fetuses isn’t new, nor is it projection. It’s simply inconvenient information for people who, decades later, make their living promoting and profiting from the killing of preborn human beings.
Other parts of the article by The 19th painted the legislation’s sponsor as an anti-LGBTQIA+ discriminatory individual, which clearly doesn’t have anything to do with the content of the prenatal development video. All of this fear-mongering over a video of a computer-generated human fetus seems a bit over the top — perhaps this is a case of “the lady doth protest too much.”
And though Corinna claimed that “anti-abortion” videos like “Baby Olivia” won’t stop people from having abortions but will just make them “feel awful about it” — somehow I doubt she even believes her own words.
