The
Founder and President of Live Action, Lila Rose is one of my favorite Pro Life
Activists, she is one person I strongly admire and respect. She does remind me
of the Sophie Scholl, who bravely spoke out against the Nazis during World War
II. I will post information about her from Wikipedia and other links.
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Lila Rose, President of Live Action
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Born
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Lila Grace Rose
July 27, 1988 San Jose, California, U.S. |
Alma mater
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University of California, Los Angeles
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Known for
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Pro-life activism
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Religion
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Roman Catholic
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Lila Grace Rose
(born July 27, 1988) is an American pro-life activist and the founder of the
pro-life group Live Action. She conducts undercover investigations of abortion
facilities in the United States, including affiliates of Planned Parenthood Federation
of America.
Biography
Rose
was raised in San Jose, California, the third of eight children. She was
home-schooled through the end of high school and majored in history at the
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She was raised Protestant and
converted to Catholicism.
Rose
founded the pro-life group Live Action when she was 15 and continued her
activism at UCLA. She cites Joan of Arc, Mark Crutcher, Jesus Christ, Martin
Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, and J. C. Willke as influences.
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Live Action Logo [PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.liveaction.org/]
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Activism
At
the age of 15, Rose founded Live Action and began giving presentations to schools
and youth groups. While at UCLA, she partnered with conservative activist James
O’Keefe III, who found inspiration in activist Saul Alinsky's grassroots
organizing handbook Rules for Radicals. After further inspiration by
Texas activist Mark Crutcher's taping of calls to Planned Parenthood locations
featuring women posing as pregnant minors, Rose and O'Keefe donned hidden
cameras in the fall of 2006 and recorded staffers in several Planned Parenthood
facilities.
Rose
has investigated abortion facilities, including Planned Parenthood affiliates,
NAF affiliates, and others, across the country since then. Her activism focuses
on issues such as the financial aspect of the abortion industry, the moral and
ethical implications of abortion itself, and the activities of Planned
Parenthood, the largest provider of abortions in the United States. Her
"Racism Project," highlighting the high abortion rate in the
African-American community, received support from Alveda King, niece of Martin
Luther King, Jr.
Rose's
investigations generally comprise investigators (including Rose herself)
portraying themselves as girls or women seeking abortion for some reason – for
example, a 15-year-old girl impregnated by a 23-year-old male. (In 2007, Rose
released videos in which she used this particular persona to document staff at
Planned Parenthood facilities advising her to lie about her age and promising
to cover up her partner's age.)
Rose
has attended workshops at the conservative non-profit Leadership Institute. In
2009, as an invited speaker at the Values Voters Summit, she suggested that
"if I could insist, as long as they are legal in our nation, abortions
would be done in the public square, until we were so sick and tired of seeing
them that we would do away with the injustice altogether. Maybe then we would
value the unborn child as we value the one-year-old child just learning to
walk[.]"
Undercover
investigations
The
Planned Parenthood Racism Project
In
2007, Rose, through her organization Live Action, released recordings of
Planned Parenthood staff, including directors of development in Idaho and New
Mexico, accepting racist donations specifically intended for abortions of
African-American children.
The
Mona Lisa Project
Another
investigation, called the Mona Lisa Project, involved Rose posing as a
13-year-old minor impregnated by a 31-year-old man. In a video recorded at a
Bloomington, Indiana Planned Parenthood facility, when told that she will need
parental consent and must name the father, Rose balks. At first, the Planned
Parenthood staffer says that the crime must be reported to Child Protective
Services, but after a moment of silence, she says, "Okay, I didn't hear
the age. I don't want to know the age. It could be reported as rape. And that's
child abuse."
Also
in the Mona Lisa Project, Rose shot an undercover video at a Planned Parenthood
facility in Birmingham, Alabama that resulted in the state placing the clinic
on probation for a year. This same facility shut down "temporarily"
in early January 2014 and has yet to reopen.
Sex
trafficking
In
February 2011, Rose released undercover videos from Planned Parenthood
facilities in several cities. These show an unidentified man and woman posing
as a pimp and a prostitute, soliciting advice from Planned Parenthood staff on
how to procure abortions and birth control for underage sex workers whom the
pimp "manages." Rose said that the videos proved that Planned
Parenthood intentionally breaks laws and covers up abuse. In response to the
videos, Planned Parenthood claimed to have reported the incidents to the FBI
but also stated that over 11,000 staffers "who have contact with patients
and teens" would be "retrained." Planned Parenthood also claimed
to have reported to the FBI at least 12 visits to its clinics by the man in the
videos prior to their publication.
No
criminal charges or investigations resulted from the videos. Rose asked Ken
Cuccinelli, then the attorney general of Virginia, to investigate Planned
Parenthood as a result of the videos. He conceded during a Fox interview that
he lacks "an actual case of it on film" – meaning a case that
involves victims instead of actors pretending to run a sex-slave business.
Cuccinelli went on to say, "But what you do have is clearly an open willingness
of several organizations, meaning subsidiaries of Planned Parenthood nationally
in the same category, sex trafficking of minors, and an open willingness to
participate in this."
Live
Action national counsel Peter Breen said an actual case is not needed,
comparing the Live Action videos to the undercover journalism in NBC's To
Catch a Predator. United
States Attorney General Eric Holder declined to pursue charges in the matter,
stating, "It is my understanding that the FBI actually has looked at that
matter" and that "prosecution was declined in that matter."
Gendercide
In
May 2012, Rose released a series of videos showing employees at Planned
Parenthood and NAF abortion centers advising patients on how to procure
sex-selective abortions. The undercover investigator posed as a pregnant mother
seeking an abortion on the grounds that her child was female, whereas she
preferred a male.
After
the first video (captured in Austin, TX) was released, Planned Parenthood
denied supporting sex-selective elective abortion and fired the employee
featured in the tape. Similar footage from Planned Parenthood locations in Maui
and Honolulu, Hawaii – including a counselor's advice on how to fund a
sex-selective abortion with state tax money – elicited no subsequent response
from the organization.
Another
release showed employees at two Arizona abortion facilities – Camelback Family
Planning in Phoenix and the Tucson Women's Center in Tucson – instructing the
investigator to suppress her reason for seeking the abortion. After hearing
that the investigator desires to abort her fetus for being female, the Phoenix
counselor tells her, "Don't let it be known!," while the surgical
assistant in Tucson says, "I'll just forget about it ... but just be sure
not to mention it [to the abortion doctor]." Sex-selective abortion is
illegal in Arizona. Neither the two taped clinics nor the NAF took any action
following the release.
Inhuman
In
the Spring of 2013, Rose released a series of undercover videos documenting
late-term abortion doctors' stated policy toward children born alive as the
result of a failed abortion attempt. The video release coincided with intense
media scrutiny of the ongoing Kermit Gosnell murder trial. These include a
video where Cesare Santangelo, a Washington, D.C. abortion doctor, admits that
he would let a child die if born alive during an abortion:
Technically – you know, legally we would be obligated to help it, you know, to survive. But, you know, it probably wouldn't. It's all in how vigorously you do things to help a fetus survive at this point,' Santangelo tells the undercover activist working for the pro-life group Live Action. 'Let's say you went into labor, the membranes ruptured, and you delivered before we got to the termination part of the procedure here, you know? Then we would do things – we would – we would not help it. We wouldn't intubate. It would be, you know, uh, a person, a terminal person in the hospital, let's say, that had cancer, you know? You wouldn't do any extra procedures to help that person survive. Like 'do not resuscitate' orders. We would do the same things here.
Commentators
opposing restrictions on abortion have accused Live Action of editing the Inhuman
videos in a misleading manner. William Saletan of Slate criticized the
videos as "orchestrated to embarrass doctors and their clinics."
Saletan claimed that he "went through the raw footage to see what the
video editors took out." Live Action includes raw footage with every video
release.
On
Thursday, May 23, 2013, U.S. Representative Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) showed Live
Action's Arizona video from the Inhuman campaign as support for HR 1797,
the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would ban the majority of
abortions after 20 weeks' (five months') gestation throughout the United States.
The bill eventually passed in the House, by a vote of 228 to 196. Senator
Lindsey Graham is expected to bring the bill up for consideration in the
Senate.
Recognition
and awards
Rose
was featured in the 2010 CNN documentary Right on the Edge, which
spotlighted young conservative activists. She has appeared on many cable
television news shows, including The O'Reilly Factor, Hannity,, The
Glenn Beck Program, and CNN's Crossfire.
In
2008, Rose was awarded $50,000 in the annual "Life Prizes" awards,
sponsored by the Gerard Health Foundation, a pro-life charity. She also
received the "Person of the Year Malachi Award" from Operation Rescue that same year.
In
2010, she was named a "Young Leader" by the pro-life non-profit Susan B. Anthony List.
In
July 2013, National Journal included Rose in their list of "The 25
Most Influential Washington Women Under 35."
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