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interesting times

Activists won the legal battle. Are they losing the culture war?

Hosted by Ross Douthat

Mr. Douthat is a columnist and the host of the “Interesting Times” podcast.

Last month I spoke with the pro-life activist Lila Rose in front of a live audience at the Catholic University of America. We were there to talk about the future of the pro-life movement, and the students in attendance had a lot of questions. I had my own questions, too. Was the pro-life movement really prepared for the fall of Roe v. Wade? Is Donald Trump actually a pro-life president? And in a society that’s rapidly polarizing along gender lines, what does the pro-life movement have to say to young women in particular? We got into those and many other subjects.

Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ross Douthat: Lila Rose, welcome to the stage at Catholic University, and welcome to “Interesting Times.”

Lila Rose: Thank you so much. I’m thrilled to be here, both for Catholic University and the interesting times that we’re in.

Douthat: That’s right. And we’re here to discuss the politics of abortion and the position of the pro-life movement a few years after Roe v. Wade was overturned. I want to know what you think the pro-life future looks like here in the second Trump administration.

But since this is a podcast, I’m going to start by asking you a little bit about your own biography. You’re the founder of Live Action, a pro-life organization, and you founded it when you were 15 years old.

Rose: Correct.

Douthat: So what was Live Action at the beginning, when you didn’t have your driver’s license yet?

Rose: [Chuckles.] Well, because I didn’t have my driver’s license, it was a group of other 15-year-olds, maybe some 16-year-olds, in my parents’ living room. Fellow students. And we were determined to just make a difference of some kind about abortion because I became very convicted that this was the human rights issue of our day.

And I had found this book in my parents’ home which basically had the history since Roe v. Wade and before that of abortion in America. It had images of fetal development and it also had images of abortion victims. And I was just very compelled that I needed to do something about the issue because I had never heard it talked about in my church growing up — I was raised evangelical. I rarely heard it talked about anywhere else. My parents were pro-life, but they were not activists.

Douthat: Where did you grow up?

Rose: San Jose, Calif. So, early Silicon Valley days. My dad was in software programming and we were very much in some ways a normal family. In other ways, not — I’m one of eight kids, so we were pro-life. They were living the pro-life conviction very beautifully by having so many kids.

All that is to say, I thought: OK, there’s 3,000 abortions a day. This has been legal since before I was born. I find out there’s a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic committing abortions up to 24 weeks within 10 miles of where I grew up, and no one seemed to say or do anything about it.

So I said I want to do something. I was interested in a lot of other causes. I was a normal kid otherwise, trying to get through high school, but I thought I got to do something, and that was the origin of Live Action.

Douthat: So I think the point at which you came to national prominence was a little bit later, when you were in college. You became famous for basically going undercover at Planned Parenthood. What were you doing in those days?

Rose: While a freshman at U.C.L.A., I was inspired to do more pro-life activism and started Live Action U.C.L.A.

Planned Parenthood was at the time especially seen as this great organization serving women’s health care. People didn’t really understand it’s the biggest abortion chain — they’re providing abortions, which end human lives. That inspired me to say: I want to expose this. I want to get people talking about this.

I started a magazine on campus and started doing investigative reporting as best I knew how.

Then I ended up going undercover into Los Angeles Planned Parenthood facilities to expose the connection between underage girls who are pregnant and abusers. Unfortunately, I’d been doing all this research and saw this horrible pattern of these court cases where girls would sue Planned Parenthood or name them in their lawsuits for the sexual abuse coverup that they endured at abortion clinics, because they were taken by their abusers when they were pregnant, and instead of reporting it — there’s mandatory reporting laws for sexual abuse — the Planned Parenthood would cover up the abuse, and then they would send the girl home back to the abuser. She’d come back for a repeat abortion; horrible cycles continued.

I started compiling the footage of them covering up the abuse, saying they wouldn’t report it and they’d get me a secret abortion.

Douthat: How old were you at that point?

Rose: Eighteen. It wasn’t hard to be 15. [Chuckles.] It was easy back then.

Douthat: And you would tell them a back story basically?

Rose: Yes, exactly. And then when we started to report that, it took up a life of its own, mostly through YouTube and some independent media. Some of the more mainstream media started to cover it when Planned Parenthood had threatened to sue me at the time for the investigative reporting.

As time went on, I started doing investigative reporting across the country. We launched Live Action News, and since then, we’ve been reporting now for the last almost two decades.

Douthat: Let’s go from there to a kind of Pro-Life 101. I’m going to ask you some very simple questions now: Why is abortion wrong?

Rose: So I would say abortion’s wrong — you can do a very simple logical syllogism. First, it’s always wrong to intentionally take an innocent human life. And I found that most people agree with that. Virtually everyone I speak to agrees with that; it’s always wrong to intentionally take an innocent human life. Abortion intentionally takes an innocent human life. So then, the conclusion of those premises is: Therefore, abortion is always wrong.

Now, some people, of course, are going to take issue with that second sentence, that second premise. You can argue their potential, you can say that they’re not the same value as a born life. Certainly they have potential, but it is undeniable scientifically that they are alive and they are human. They are a human life. You wouldn’t have to have an abortion to end the pregnancy if they were not a human life.

That is why in the pro-life movement we oppose the murder — we consider it murder — of preborn children: for the same reasons we oppose the murder of those that are born.

Douthat: And what would you argue to someone who listens to that and says: Well, surely there’s some kind of ambiguous ground in there? Someone who says: Look, I can accept that abortion kills an organism that is a member of the species Homo sapiens, and I can even accept that that might be wrong, but I don’t think that that rises to the level of what we think about when we think about homicide, murder and so on.

Rose: Yes.

Douthat: I think usually when people make this argument, if they push it through, they end up saying something like: There is some feature of humanity — awareness, consciousness, brain development and so on — that is just not there in the tiniest embryos.

I think there’s a lot of people who have a hard time seeing the tiniest embryos as the equivalent of an infant or an adult human being. What’s your response to that quest for a kind of “wrong but not murder” perspective on the subject?

Rose: Yes. And of course we get that all the time. That’s the common objection: It’s just not the same, it’s just not the same. They’re different. It’s different. The entities, when they’re unborn, for all of these reasons are different.

And I think you can categorize all of those reasons under the acronym SLED. SLED stands for size, level of development, environment and degree of dependency. And these are the only four distinguishing factors between a preborn child — or preborn life — and a born life.

Of course, size is different — you already referenced that the embryo is clearly smaller than a born child. A newborn child is clearly smaller than a toddler, who’s clearly smaller than you or me — I’m smaller than you. I’m shorter.

Douthat: Indeed.

[Audience chuckles.]

Rose: And our size does not determine our value as human lives, and it certainly should not determine our legal status. So there is size.

Then there is level of development. It is clear that an embryo is less developed than a fetus, and a fetus is less developed than a newborn, a newborn than a toddler, than an adolescent, than an adult, et cetera. But your level of development as a human life — we all begin life as a single-cell embryo, and we will end life, hopefully, in our gray old glory years when we die peacefully in our beds. That’s what we hope.

Douthat: I intend to die at the podcast mic.

Rose: Oh, no, that sounds quite dramatic!

[Audience laughs.]

Douthat: No, I’m joking.

Rose: But our level of development also does not determine or negate our humanity. We are humans that are developing. And if you, again, tie legal status or basic human rights — like life, the right to not be killed — to our level of development, then I would say it’s an elitist society where the strong get to have tyranny over the weak.

Then there’s environment. Clearly the child in the womb is in the womb, not outside the womb. A lot of people say: Well, birth is personhood. You’re suddenly a life outside of the womb and you have legal status — but your environment in any other context wouldn’t determine your humanity because you’re born in a different country, born to a different family, or you’re in a different location. That doesn’t change your humanity.

And then finally, your degree of dependency. It is clear — and this is the big one, bodily autonomy — they’re totally dependent on the mother. Therefore, the mother should have the power to end the life of her child in the womb — but only in the womb, not a newborn. We are all dependent in one way or another. You are dependent, myself, we are dependent on people who we can get food from. And otherwise, if we can’t get our food, we would die.

A newborn is certainly dependent on his or her parents, and those parents have to use their bodies to care for that newborn, or the surrogate adult that they transfer care to. And an unborn child is totally dependent — completely dependent — on his or her mother, but that doesn’t change his or her humanity. In fact, I would argue that proves their humanity because that’s how we all start life. That is the nature of a human being, to be interdependent and to start life totally dependent and, often, to end life totally dependent.

So when you look at the acronym of SLED, you can see none of these differentiators between an unborn human and a born human mean that there should be less value assigned or a differing legal status. Both are human and both deserve fundamental human rights.

Douthat: I’ve always thought that the dependence question has ended up being where a lot of the legal and political arguments have rested, because it is connected to the idea that it is in effect illegitimate for the government to ask women to carry the unique burden of having this life that is so dependent on them, that is literally inside them. You’ve had three children; you’re aware of the substantial burden that pregnancy involves.

I do think the level of development argument is the place where there is a kind of intuition that people have, that until you have consciousness, you have not passed some kind of threshold into humanity. And obviously, a problem there is that no one knows exactly when consciousness begins, but someone sitting here arguing with you could say: Fine, I think the S, the E and the D make a good case against second- or third-trimester abortion. But are you really telling me that the 28-cell organism that clearly doesn’t seem conscious at all has attained a status where you have to grant it full legal rights?

Rose: Well, and I would say: Listen, to judge the single-cell embryo as somehow not up to par because they’re not at 20 or 24 weeks yet or whatever you put as your arbitrary marker for consciousness, I don’t think there’s any good argument for that. Of course, consciousness is very special about humans, that we eventually develop it, but humans can go in and out of consciousness. Humans can have varying degrees of consciousness. A newborn clearly has far less consciousness than they do just a year later, and certainly less than an adult.

I would argue that’s a very arbitrary standard. First of all, you can’t, again, put a line in the gestational time of pregnancy and say this is exactly when it happened. So it’s also very dangerous to say, well, that’s going to be my line for telling someone they have legal value or not — because you don’t know when it is, exactly.

I just don’t buy that argument. I don’t find it compelling. I understand people want a line in the sand that they can draw to say some abortion is OK.

And I think the question we should ask is: Why do we want that so badly? That, I think, is the interesting discussion. Why is America so hooked on abortion?

Douthat: But a lot of people would say that if people want it, they want it because they associate legal abortion with what gets described as the language of reproductive rights, reproductive freedom, but which is fundamentally about female equality in what was historically a male-dominated society. Roe v. Wade was decided during a particular surge of feminism and female advancement in American society.

I think it’s very hard for a lot of people to imagine a world where abortion is restricted as it was in 1955, but with the landscape of female achievement and opportunity that you have in the 2020s. Do you think there’s a tension there?

Rose: I think that the tension is an unnecessary one. I think we’ve walked ourselves into a brick wall and we didn’t need to do it. The mistake of feminism — and not first-wave feminism; I think the first wave was beautiful — but then, as we went further down the waves with feminism, the mistake was to say: Well, now I need to be the same as men. Not just have equal status under the law, but now I need to be the same. So if a man can’t get pregnant, then I shouldn’t have to get pregnant. If we have sex and he’s not pregnant and then I get pregnant, then I should be able to disappear the pregnancy.

That’s not reality. The reality is that men and women are different. And when you get pregnant, you’re pregnant with a new human life that also has rights and bodily autonomy and a whole lifetime of choices in front of them.

When we play the game of unreality, that men and women are the same and should always be treated the same bodily in terms of what they can do with their bodies or reproductive systems, it’s just a mistake. That’s one of the reasons why, of course, we have one million abortions a year now, because we’re not living........

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