Father Dave has a conversation with Lila Rose, the founder and president of Live Action, an organization dedicated to ending abortion and inspiring a culture that respects all human life. Lila started Live Action when she was just 15 years old and it’s grown into the largest national, online pro-life platform, specifically targeting millennials and member of Generation Z with its message.
Lila explains that she converted to Catholicism while she was in college but actually became a pro-life activist prior to that after discovering that more than 3,000 legal abortions, including late-term abortions, are performed daily in the United States.
Father Dave mentions that the abortion debate has reignited due to the recent pro-life laws passed in Georgia and Alabama, along with the late-term abortion law passed in New York six months ago. He mentions the rhetoric circulating that says men need to stop telling women what to do with their bodies, and he asks Lila, as a young woman, how she responds to that line of thinking. Lila points out that female politicians led the passage of Alabama’s pro-life bill, most pro-life groups are run by women, and Roe v. Wade was decided by seven male Supreme Court Justices. Propagating the narrative that “old white men” make decisions about women’s bodies allows for the spread of the falsehood that pro-life women don’t exist. She believes that both men, who also create life, and women, need to speak out.
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Father Dave mentions that as a Catholic priest, he can sympathize with people who don’t come from a religious worldview and don’t believe that life begins at the moment of conception, but he doesn’t understand people who don’t see how a child is a human life at nine months or even when a heartbeat is first detected. However, he is up for a rational debate about when life begins. Lila responds that there is no debate about when life begins since science proves that life begins at fertilization when a zygote that just needs time for nourishment and growth already has a complete set of DNA. She tells Father Dave that an embryo is “a unique individual member of the human species and deserves to be treated as such.”
Father Dave asks Lila what she thinks about the counterargument that the “heartbeat bill” doesn’t give women choice because a heart begins beating at just three weeks, but most women don’t even know they’re pregnant at that point in the child’s development. Lila defends her point, saying, “You can’t define someone’s humanity by their ability to feel pain in that moment or by how big they are or by how developed they are or by how wanted they are. If you’re human, you’re human, period. If you’re human, you deserve protection, period.”
Father Dave poses a question to Lila from a Busted Halo fan on Facebook. Mary Rose (no relation to Lila Rose) complains about the #MyBodyMyChoice hashtag she sees on social media and wants to know how she can respond to these people without, as she puts it, sparking World War III. Mary Rose adds that she’s had fertility issues and also struggled with the adoption process and that she and many others would welcome these children into their homes. Lila encourages Mary Rose to “not let the hate and the anger and the pain silence us.” She directs Mary Rose to the Live Action website, which offers pro-life tools, including pro-life replies to abortion advocates.
