Lila Rose, founder of Live Action and author of Fighting for Life, traces her 15-year-old awakening to fetal development imagery, sparking a mission to end abortion amid 3,000 daily U.S. procedures. Citing women’s lifelong trauma—including a 40-year-guilt case—she rejects abortion as "the greatest destroyer of peace," comparing it to infanticide and dismissing back-alley fears with pre-Roe data. She condemns RU486’s 24 deaths and mail-order risks, urging graphic medical exposure for post-abortion healing while celebrating pro-life laws and a "quiet revolution" reshaping justice. Her fight hinges on exposing abortion’s brutality as civilization’s defining moral choice. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, in our desperate attempt to raise the level of intelligence and elegance on the show, we always bring you the best guests we can.
And today is no exception.
We have Lila Rose, one of my favorites.
She's a speaker, writer, human rights activist, the founder of Live Action, which is a nonprofit dedicated to ending abortion.
And she's a podcast host on the Lila Rose Show.
And she's written a book called Fighting for Life, Becoming a Force for Change in a Wounded World.
It's out now.
Lila, it's always good to see you.
How are you?
Thanks, Andrew.
Good to see you too.
Doing well.
Thank you.
So let's start out by talking about you first.
I mean, I want to talk about abortion.
I think it's one of the most important subjects we can talk about.
But I want to know how you got involved in this.
What propelled you to take this path?
Well, I got involved as a teenager, started live action at 15, and it was the result of a lot of moments that were just turning points for me as a younger kid, realizing what abortion was.
I'm one of eight kids.
I'm in a big, from a big family, and so five younger siblings had the ultrasound pictures on the fridge growing up.
So there was always this very pro-life ethic in the house growing up.
But I found out about abortion.
And I was by reading a book, I actually saw images of victims of abortion in that book.
You can see the humanity of the baby in the first trimester.
It's just undeniable and it was so remarkable.
And it broke my heart when I started to learn about it, as it does for many people.
And at the time, the abortion rate was 3,000 children killed a day in America legally.
And my mother Teresa was a big hero of mine growing up.
And she had this, I didn't know her, of course, but I knew of her and admired her.
And she would call abortion.
And I read her words.
She said, abortion is the greatest destroyer of peace in the world.
And reading those words as a kid, I was just, it crystallized the crisis for me.
I mean, there's a lot of issues.
I was very much interested in social justice issues as a girl.
I was one of those very empathetic types.
But when I read those words, you know, Mother Teresa did not say poverty.
She didn't say racism.
She didn't say sexism was the greatest destroyer of peace.
She said abortion was.
She could have said a lot of other things.
And as I just investigated that more and learned more, when you destroy that bond of love between a mother and her child and make the womb a war zone, how do we have peace in any society?
So I was just deeply convicted.
I didn't know what I was getting myself into, but I wanted to do something and I started live action to educate other young people because I thought that's the key.
You know, if people just knew about fetal development, you know, what abortion actually does, the harm to women, then we can change things.
And it just began a wild journey once I stuck my neck out there a little bit and tried to make a difference.
Well, do you, you must meet a lot of women who've had abortions, I'm assuming.
What do you find when you talk to them or can you talk to them?
Oh, I mean, I've had the privilege of talking to, interviewing hundreds and hundreds of women who've had abortions over the years and men who've been part of those decisions, some of them.
And, you know, the common, I think, a couple of the common themes that I see, first of all, just total heartbreak.
And these are women who had this moment of realization, this was my baby.
This was a baby.
There's just this devastating heartbreak that they experience.
And then, you know, anger over the lies that they're told and anger for how our society, you know, presents abortion as a quick fix, right?
I mean, they say, if you are pregnant, it's unplanned.
You can't afford it.
You're in school, your partner's not supportive, just have an abortion.
And it's not that simple in the end for the woman.
I mean, just have an abortion.
That's a pregnancy she had or a child, a son or daughter she had.
And she might walk out feeling momentary relief after her abortion.
But I mean, according to studies, the social research that's been done, it's going to be devastating for her lifelong.
So, you know, I'll never forget, I actually talk about one of these women in my book, Fighting for Life.
After a speech I gave, she came up to me.
She's an older woman, and she said, I haven't told anyone this for 40 years.
She's lived with it like 30, 40 years.
And she said, but I think about it every day.
Her eyes are filling with tears, the abortion she had as a young woman.
And it's just, it's devastating.
And it makes me upset.
You know, we need to, women deserve education.
They deserve support.
And we need to stop proposing abortion as a solution, killing children as a solution to our problems in our society.
You know, one of the central arguments of the pro-abortion people is that the alternative to illegal abortions is going to be dangerous back alley type abortions, as the phrase goes.
First of all, is that true?
And I guess the first question I should ask is: is what you want to have abortion made illegal?
Is that what you would prefer?
And if so, is that argument fair?
Okay.
Yes, I think it's essential.
I mean, if abortion is the intentional killing of an innocent human life, which it is, the only difference, there's no moral difference between killing a newborn and killing a pre-born.
They're both human beings with the same value, and our law should protect both.
How you protect both, you know, there's nuances in any state murder laws, how you enforce those.
You know, there's a lot of mitigating factors with a lot of abortions because there's pressure, the woman experiencing a lot of fear or anxiety, you know, in the process of maybe seeking out an abortion.
But I think the key principle is this with back the, you know, the whole thing of back alley abortions.
If you make any crime illegal, you're going to still see some of that crime.
You know, we make rape illegal.
Some rape still happen.
That doesn't mean you make rape legal, right?
That doesn't make you mean you make theft legal.
It doesn't make you make fraud legal because it can still happen.
That being said, in countries that have made abortion illegal, they have seen a sharp decline in the abortion rate and they have very low back alley abortion rates.
And that's because women ultimately, we, you know, we're not children.
We understand risk.
And yes, you can be driven to such fear and extreme, you know, a state of mind that's so extreme that you can take extreme risk upon yourself.
But most women having abortions today, Andrew, they're doing it because it's presented as a quick fix.
The abortion clinic is a few miles away.
They might be able to get it funded by the state.
And in California, you get it paid for by the state of California, and it's presented as the quick fix.
If abortion is no longer the quick fix, far fewer, far fewer women will have them.
And that's proved out in countries that have made abortion illegal.
And it's also proved out in our country.
Before we made abortion illegal in 1973, when the legal, the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Way to make it legal, the abortion rate was very low, the back alley abortion rate.
Once it became legal, it skyrocketed.
And so you just look at our history, other states, and we do know lives will be saved if abortion is illegal.
Far less women will have abortions.
And I think the other key thing to acknowledge is women are still dying from abortion under legal abortion.
In Argentina, they just legalized abortion.
One of the pro-abortion activists went and had her first legal abortion in a hospital.
She died.
She and her baby both died because of the procedure.
In the United States, it's not even carefully documented, but women are dying today from abortion procedures in legal clinics.
So it's already a dangerous procedure.
It shouldn't be supported by the law.
In the New York Times, a feminist named Jessica Valente wrote a piece about saying the Food and Drug Administration has announced that people seeking abortion pills during the COVID-19 pandemic will no longer have to visit a doctor's office to get a prescription.
She goes on, she says, for years, anti-abortion activists have tried to impose their morality under the guise of women's health and protection.
Legislators have proposed anti-choice bills with names like women's right to know, which sound compassionate, but in reality force doctors to falsely claim that women who end their pregnancy suffer physical and mental harm.
The primary political strategy of abortion foes relies on the claim that abortion is brutal and dangerous, a myth that is much harder to perpetuate when people can easily access medicine to safely end their pregnancies at home.
You want to respond to that?
I'm familiar with Jessica Valenti as a very, you know, she commonly comments as it frequently comments as a pro-abortion advocate.
And first of all, abortion is always brutal for the preborn child.
It dismembers that child.
It starves that child to death chemically.
It forcibly removes that child from his or her mother's womb and kills that child.
So if you're that child, abortion is brutal.
It's easy to say it's not brutal when you're the one who's strong writing a New York Times op-ed and you're protected by law, as Jessica Valenti is.
It's easy to say it's not brutal when you're the adult who's protected by law if someone tries to take your life.
So that's the first thing.
The second thing is she's commenting on chemical abortion, on RU486 abortion, which has thousands of adverse side effects.
They don't even require counting for it.
But even despite that, there's been thousands of adverse side effects, hemorrhaging, internal bleeding, even death, 24 deaths from these pills since the FDA under President Clinton then, Bill Clinton, made it legal to ship these, to hand out these lethal pills that kill human beings to women.
And so what President Biden is trying to do is make it possible to actually send lethal pills that you take in the mail without any medical in-person consultation.
And there's a lot of problems here with this for the woman's sake, as well as it being lethal for the child.
Two things I'll just mention that Jessica, of course, did not mention in her op-ed for the New York Times.
Number one, when you have a pill shipped to your home, you can do whatever you want with that.
If I'm a sexual abuser and I have an underage girl I'm abusing and I want to give her a secret abortion, when this happens commonly in our country, and I want to do it without anybody knowing about it, I'll arrange to have this pill shipped to my home.
I'll have the young girl do an online consultation.
I'll control the whole thing.
And now I'm handing lethal pills to underage girls.
So that's something, that's an area.
I'm not making this up.
This will happen.
Court cases prove that young girls are regularly taken to abortion clinic by their abusers.
So this is another tool on the hand of abusers, of traffickers, because there's no healthcare professional actually having to sit down with the woman or the girl to help her out and to actually see how she's doing.
The second thing that Jessica doesn't mention is ectopic pregnancy.
This gets a little in the weeds here, but about 1, 2% of pregnancies are ectopic, meaning they're not in the womb.
The baby actually implants in another part of the woman's body, usually her fallopian tube.
And the problem with this is this can be lethal for the mother.
It almost always is, and lethal for the baby.
And so for about 1% to 2% of women who are ordering these pills, there's no medical examination, right?
So because Jessica wants women to get them in the mail.
They don't go into the doctor's office.
There's no ultrasound.
If they take that pill, the effects of the pill, which are very damaging, it's basically forcing an abortion, can look very much like the effects of an ectopic pregnancy.
And if you don't catch an ectopic pregnancy in time, it can be lethal for the woman.
So what this means is the pill will be masking for potentially thousands of women with ectopic pregnancies per symptoms.
And we can see potentially thousands of these women at risk for their lives because they're not getting proper medical care.
So this is just one example of how devastating this new policy is from the Biden administration.
Let me ask you, this is a somewhat complex question, but it's something that troubles me a lot.
Women who go in to get abortions, as you have said, are sort of operating in a cloud of unknowing.
Masking Ectopic Pregnancies00:02:52
They've been told that this is a simple procedure, that it's going to be easy, that it's going to solve their problems, as you say, a quick fix.
They then go in and have the abortion.
And as Gloria Steinem once said, the one abortion most women support is their own.
In order for them to grasp what they've done, they have to face something terrible.
They have to face the idea that they have done something that is really wrong.
How do you approach women?
It's much easier for them to say, no, no, no, I was right.
I did the right thing.
This helped me.
My life is better now.
How do you approach women?
Or can you approach women and break through that without really destroying them?
Do you understand my question?
I mean, I know it's a complicated idea, but it's.
Yeah.
No, it's a very, very good question, Andrew.
And we think about it a lot.
I think about it a lot.
And I actually, you know, my first chapter in my book is called Let Your Heart Break.
And one of my last chapters in my book is learn to grieve.
Because if you don't let your heart break and learn to grieve, whether you've had an abortion or you haven't, no matter what in your life, we all have different, you know, devastating experiences in varying degrees in our lives.
If we just bury it, bury the thing that we did or the thing that was done to us and never grieve it, never get angry about it, never let ourselves feel about it and get the healing we need, then we can't heal.
You know, we're cutting ourselves off from freedom from that deep wound or trauma.
And so the same is true.
You know, we work a lot to encourage women to seek out post-abortion healing.
I've worked with women personally to connect them to these resources.
And one of the key things with post-abortion healing is letting yourself grieve, because that was the loss of a child.
And is that devastating?
Yes.
I mean, I'll share personally, I just, my husband and I, we experienced a miscarriage recently and it was devastating.
It was absolutely devastating.
And in a sense, I'll never be over it because that was a child we lost.
But I had to let myself be devastated and there's pain in that.
And of course, if it's a miscarriage that you chose, you know, an abortion, there's another added element of devastation because that's something that you could have not done.
You know, there was all the couldhaves.
That child could have been grown up.
It could have had a first birthday.
He or she could have, you know, had a whole life.
So, but allowing ourselves to feel the devastation, I think is key.
So in that sense, when we educate at Live Action, we share about the abortion procedure.
We actually share the actual animation, medical animations of the procedure so people can see actually what happens during abortion.
Does it make some women who've had abortions very uncomfortable?
Yes, but we encourage still knowing what happened, because if you don't ever grapple with what actually happened to you and your child, you're not going to be able to heal.
A Quiet Revolution00:00:57
And that's one of the key principles I talk about in my book and that we encourage when we do education.
The book is Fighting for Life, Becoming a Force for Change in a Wounded World by Lila Rose.
Lila, I'm out of time, but I'd like just a quick answer.
Do you think you'll succeed?
I do.
And it's not that I will succeed.
It's that we will succeed.
I think that the arc of our history can bend towards justice if enough people stand up.
And there's more and more people standing up than ever before.
The abortion rate has declined in the last 10 years.
There's unprecedented pro-life legislation right now at the state level, hundreds and hundreds of bills.
It's a quiet revolution, but it's a revolution.
And I don't think we can survive as a civilization if we accept the killing of our children.
And so it's a life or death struggle, but I think we will choose life in the end.
And I'm excited and honored to be a part of the fight.
Lila Rose, the book is Fighting for Life, Becoming a Force for Change in a Wounded World.