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 |
Born | Lila Grace Rose July 27, 1988 San Jose, California, U.S. |
Alma mater | University of California, Los Angeles |
Known for | Pro-life activism |
Religion | Roman Catholic |
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/] |
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 Inhumanvideos 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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