On Thursday, April 8, University of Chicago Students for Life welcomed Lila Rose to speak before members of the university community.
Rose is a pro-life writer, speaker, activist, and founder of Live Action, a national pro-life organization. Since she started Live Action in her living room when she was fifteen years old, Rose has had her investigative reporting featured in The Atlantic, the Washington Post, ABC Nightline, and CBS, among others. Her book, “Fighting for Life: Becoming a Force for Change in a Wounded World” is forthcoming.
Over 80 attendees participated in Rose’s virtual talk, which was entitled “Abortion: The Ultimate Exploitation of Women.” After her talk, Rose answered a wide range of audience questions. Some attendees were fans of Rose. Others came in order to challenge her assertions. Rose welcomed them all.
Rose presented a detailed argument, which she broadly summarized as follows:
“Abortion kills. […] A human embryo and a human fetus are human lives. It’s always wrong to intentionally take their lives. Abortion, by its very nature, cannot be empowering. It is the exploitation of a child as well as a woman. And the women’s rights movement ultimately has been hijacked by the abortion movement […] Instead of truly being about advancing women, it is now about advancing abortion and the abortion industry.”
Rose views abortion as the greatest human rights abuse of our lifetime, and she urges individuals to empower each other by taking a stand. According to Rose, “A woman doesn’t walk into an abortion clinic feeling powerful. She walks into an abortion clinic, typically, because she feels powerless.”
Rose is a young mother herself, and she emphasizes the importance of institutions that support parents. Among other services, she advocates for better pregnancy and maternity leave, healthcare, and childcare. Rose also highlights the importance of both motherhood and fatherhood, placing special emphasis on the need for parents committed to long-term, loving relationships.
Most of the event’s attendees were college students, and Rose tailored her presentation to them. Rose went to UCLA, and she spoke from experience when acknowledging that many ambitious students view family life as less meaningful than the pursuit of a high-power career. However, Rose urged against acceptance of this view:
“We need to stop […] saying that somehow it’s either or, that somehow it’s either you have a family, and your dreams die, or you have to go pursue your dreams, and you can’t have a family. I know for me that having a family, that my husband, my son, that they ultimately are the greatest garden for my dreams […] they inspire and fuel my dreams and […] fighting for them is ultimately the most meaningful thing in my life.”
Rose thus believes that both motherhood and fatherhood are the most profound services that an individual may offer to the world.
Rose acknolwedges the difficulties inherent to proceeding with an unexpected pregnancy, but she confidently argues that abortion is never the answer. During the event’s Q&A, she promoted a zero-tolerance policy toward abortion.
Plan B is distinct from the abortion pill (RU-486), and Rose claims that we don’t have exact statistics on the effects of Plan B. However, Rose still views Plan B as “morally problematic” because she alleges that the medication is designed “to be able to cause a very early abortion, as well as [to] prevent fertilization.” This claim conflicts with Planned Parenthood’s assertion to the contrary.
According to Rose, women are often taken to abortion clinics by their rapists and abusers, making abortion a means through which violent criminals may continue to exploit their female victims. Rose vocally condemns sexual violence, and argues that such violence does not justify abortion:
“Sexual violence is horrrific. Pregnancy after sexual violence for some women is incredibly scary and also horrrific. I mean it’s not something that they signed up for […] but we have to look at this holistically. […] We do not even give the death penalty to rapists […] so why would we permit the death penalty for the children conceived in rape?”
There were over 70 audience questions submitted during the talk and, given the event’s time limits, attendees were unable to pose follow-ups to the few questions Rose had time to address.
Rose’s talk comes almost two years after a large protest for and against a UChicago College Council (CC) bill on funding abortions. The bill “would have prohibited the expenditure of any CC–authorized funds toward abortion, except in cases where rape, incest, or the danger of death of the pregnant person was involved.”
During the protest, women held homemade signs that said “Public Cervix announcement: my body, my choice” and “access to abortion saves lives.” The bill to prohibit select abortion funding ultimately failed, thereby demonstrating the 2019 College Council’s general approval of abortions.
In response to pro-choice advocates, Rose argues that abortion is not a moral means through which to pursue personal advancement:
“Enough is enough. We do not accept the killing of another innocent human life as a path to advancement. We must do better. We demand that we do better. It’s always wrong to dismember an innocent human life. It cripples our ability for true advancement when we take the shortcut of killing. [We must] finally recognize that this is the greatest human rights abuse of our day, the most people being killed, the most people deprived of their most fundamental human right, all in the name of women.”
Rose believes that women are exploited as “mascots of abortion,” and that this is wrong. She rejects the racism and eugenics of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, America’s largest abortion chain. And she speaks across the country, in an attempt to spread her message to those who disagree.
*Evita Duffy, the Chicago Thinker’s managing editor, was one of the moderators of Lila Rose’s talk. The Chicago Thinker, however, did not itself sponsor or organize the event.
hey i just wanted to say that this is really bad! good try guys but this definitely wasn’t a good idea. please don’t write any more articles thank you
Dear This is not good,
Are you silencing free speech? How about just not reading Miss Rose’s article next time?
Exactly. Rather than reading this article, the writer could take some time to read “On Liberty” by Mill.
dear christine,
i am just making a suggestion. this is my right as an american citizen. i will be praying for you
So tearing an innocent baby from limb to limb is good? You need to get off the meth honey because you are one sick subhuman!
I’m not quite sure I follow the argument here. Not regarding being pro-life or pro-choice or anything, but I don’t quite understand how she argued that abortions amount to exploitation of women? You can argue that abortions harm fetuses or that they harm women, but “exploitation” is a very specific term with a very specific definition, and “harm” and “exploitation” are not quite exactly the same.
In the instance of an abuser taking a victim to get an abortion, that would be exploitation. Perhaps Rose wasn’t clear enough. She could have added reasons.
Here’s the recording of the event if anyone is interested in watching! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV7P4DM5Y9E
So you claim here that the use of Plan B is morally problematic because it prevents an egg from being fertilized. By that logic, is using a condom morally problematic? What about using birth control? Is it morally problematic to be infertile? People lose eggs during menstruation, and those eggs could have had the potential to become fetuses. Is having your period morally problematic? Is any kind of sperm ejaculation not resulting in a pregnancy morally problematic? I understand what you’re trying to say here but it doesn’t make sense if you think about it for more than a couple seconds. If you extend that logic far enough, that implies that anyone with a working uterus who isn’t pregnant 100% of the time is committing a morally problematic act by losing eggs that could be potential humans.
The argument for why Plan B is morally problematic is not because it prevents an egg from being fertilized but because it can “inhibit implantation” – thus preventing a fertilized egg from attaching to a woman’s womb by causing the lining to thin. Preventing an egg from being fertilized is not an abortion, however, preventing the fertilized egg (this woudl be an egg and sperm) from implanting means that Plan B is terminating a life, not just losing an egg.
Product Information at 12.1 which references how Plan B can inhibit implantation: https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2009/021998lbl.pdf
So a fertilized egg is a life but not the individual egg or individual sperm?? you didn’t clarify anything–my argument here still stands. Why would it be morally wrong to prevent the egg from implanting but not morally wrong to prevent the egg from even getting fertilized? My question is, at what point does the egg become a “life”? When it’s created? When it’s fertilized? You’re going to need to draw a line here, and I’m not sure your line of reasoning allows you to do so. By your logic, the unfertilized egg is a life, and therefore it’s immoral to menstruate.
Yes, a fertilized egg is a life but not the indivdiual egg or sperm. A sperm has the genetic code of the man (23 chromosomes) and the egg has the genetic code of the woman (23 chromosomes). While an individual egg or sperm comes from a human, they so not have the information necessary for a human to grow from just it and they also have the inability to reproduce. When fertilization occurs, a new biologically-distinct human with 46 (or sometimes 47 in the case of Down Syndrome) chromosomes exists. This human (in the earliest stage as a fertilized egg) has all the information necessary for a lifetime of human growth.
In short, the egg becomes a life when it is fertilized with the sperm such that a new genetic code of 46 (or 47) chromosomes exists. It is not morally wrong to prevent the egg from getting fertilized because that egg has only the genetic code of the woman. I hope this clarifies, but do reply back if I can help make my argument more clear.
Thank you,very easy to understand and share,good job! I was hoping someone would clarify the connection.
“According to Rose, women are often taken to abortion clinics by their rapists and abusers, making abortion a means through which violent criminals may continue to exploit their female victims.”
Are you not aware that there are also cases of abortion in which the affected person wishes to terminate a pregnancy BECAUSE the baby was conceived in sexual assault? Don’t you think that withholding access to abortion might be able to be used as a tool of exploitation by abusers as well? This statement also assumes that rapists and abusers are usually random evil strangers, when that isn’t the case at all–74% of sexual assault cases (and these statistics are only the ones that are reported) involve someone the victim knows. An abusive partner, for example, could withhold abortion access from their victim. That’s not to say that the situation you’ve described couldn’t or doesn’t ever happen, but you ought to consider that this goes both ways.
Do you know which country outright banned abortion? Romania under communist dictator Ceausescu (I’ll leave you to consider the irony of espousing a very similar position to his). What happened? A massive number of unwanted children being born, who were placed in squalid conditions in government orphanages, where abuse and starvation were rampant, and massive maternal mortality due to women getting illegal abortions, which were performed in unsafe conditions. You forget an unfortunate truth: banning abortions will not stop them from happening. Instead, they will simply become less safe and lead to more death. We see this in Romania: after the decree banning abortions was passed in late 1966 and not repealed until 1989, but abortion still occurred regularly, and thousands of women died.
Learn history instead of playing moralizing games.
Your comment assumes “unwanted children” would be better off dead — killed before birth (and even after?) so as not to burden society or their parents. This is an unfortunately common belief that was used to justify history’s worst crimes against humanity. It lives on in the pro-choice movement.
Dear player of moralizing games,
Ah, yes. The old “abortion is basically genocide” argument.
My comment assumes nothing of the sort. It simply points out that these children (many of whose parents who could not afford to take care of them since Romania was in a depression in the 1980s) still died (in addition to mothers who died because of unsafe abortions), despite the prohibition of abortion.
The only way to actually reduce abortions is to increase access to contraceptives and comprehensive sex education…wait, conservatives are against that, aren’t they.
Oh. Whoops.
Please continue playing your moralizing games.
Dear philosopher,
Morals aren’t a game when lives are at stake. Feel free to “point out” that some Romanian children who would have been aborted were mistreated and died anyway. That’s much better than if they all had been killed in utero. Feticide is the easy solution to unwanted children, but the moral solution is to treat them well. Abortionists have chosen easy. While pretending to be too good for “games”, you really just come across as too lazy to care.
Dear gamer,
If saving the largest amount of lives is truly your goal, them you would oppose Decree 770, which banned abortion in Romania, as it also lead to a large increase in maternal mortality.
Oh, wait. Do mothers’s lives not matter to you?
Keep playing those games. Maybe one day they’ll approach reality.
No, you would oppose both communism and abortion. There’s no inherent tradeoff between the life of the mother and the life of the infant, except in a few extreme circumstances that account for a small fraction of a percent of all abortions. It’s not a law of nature that women must die when feticide is prohibited. That’s a failure of primitive and unjust societies like communist Romania.
Dear member of the PCR (Romanian Communist Party),
Almost invariably, though, the outright prohibition of abortion leads to increased maternal mortality due to the demand for abortion not decreasing and people resorting to unsafe methods. You seem to overlook this.
If you want to reduce abortion, increase access to contraceptives and comprehensive sex education. You seem to not be in favor of this, so I can only assume you don’t actually want to reduce abortion rates.
Now, go study theory. Read up on your Nicolae Ceausescu Thought.
Mass murder of unborn humans is not OK just because it protects a few women who would choose to seek unsafe abortions. If you want to reduce abortion, you would sterilize the entire population. But reducing abortions is a secondary goal. The primary goal is to live in a just society.
So you agree with me. Prohibiting abortion not only does not reduce demand for abortions, as some will still happen, but will also lead to maternal death, on account of abortions being done in unsafe conditions.
Great. Why are we even having this conversation then?
Of course prohibition will reduce the demand. Any change in maternal morbidity and mortality would be statistically undetectable. It may even improve, given how abysmal it is presently with abortion on demand. But who can predict the future? Not anyone thinking 2021 America is like communist Romania. What is 100% certain is that all of us will no longer be complicit in mass murder. The sooner the better.
Did the 18th Amendment reduce the demand of alcohol?
Did Decree 770 reduce the demand for abortion?
The answer to the above questions is…no.
Assuming that banning abortion will reduce demand can be easily disproven by actual observed results. Not very much of a scientist, are you?
Banning abortion, much like banning alcohol, will do very little. Banning abortion will still lead to death, both of mothers and children.
We’ve banned theft, after all, yet people still are robbed.
Don’t want an abortion? Don’t get one.
Abortion is provided by state-licensed doctors at no cost due to government subsidy. Prohibiting it will very obviously reduce it. But if you need it proved by science that theft being illegal reduces the rate of theft then common sense escapes you.
I made a bad example about robbery, sorry.
I also would like to say that I agree with you in that I believe abortions should be reduced. I disagree with you on the best way to do that. I maintain my position that outright banning abortion is not the best way to reduce abortion, as I have mentioned. It is most likely to be inefficient and lead to maternal mortality, and not be an effective way to reduce demand for abortion. Instead, I believe increased access to contraceptives and sex education will be more successful in reducing demand.
I am an 84 year old white male and retired lawyer. The many comments to this essay appear to favor abortion, which shocks me. As to when life begins, it should be obvious that it is not before sperm has fertilized the egg. I consider myself religious and I attend church regularly as well as serve as a lay Eucharistic minister in the Episcopal Church. Episcopalian clergy are generally, in my experience, mostly political liberals (I am a conservative). What greatly puzzles me is how these same liberal clergy rarely speak out against abortion. Where has their supposed belief in the sanctity of human life failed them? Even more alarming is the number of suburban white women (and some men) who have admitted to favoring abortion as a method of population control of undesirables, who upon further questioning are usually minorities.
I’m surprised no one has brought up Judith Thomson’s essay “A Defense of Abortion.” In it, she performs a thought experiment (from Wikipedia, with edits to make it fit the stupid character limit): “You wake up and find yourself in bed with a famous unconscious violinist. He has a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has searched all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but in nine months he will have recovered, and can safely be unplugged from you.”
She then argues that despite the fact that he will die if you unplug yourself, it is morally okay to do so. His right to life does not override your own bodily autonomy. The same, she says, applies here: while a fetus is a human life, his or her right to life does not override the woman’s right over her own body.
I, like you, find it honestly pretty surprising to see how many people reject the idea that fetuses count as a human life, and I also share your concerns when it comes to things like eugenics and population control. I don’t even necessarily think it’s always moral, only in certain cases; if a pregnant woman asked me if she should get an abortion, I would probably say no unless she had a really strong reason to do so. At the same time, I don’t think criminalization is the best way to go about things. As surveys have shown, proper sex ed and access to birth control and contraceptives do far more to lower the abortion rate than simply making it illegal.
The goal isn’t only to slow the rate of killing. The goal is to live in a society that recognizes killing unborn humans is wrong.
Is that the goal, though? It’s the act of abortion itself that you consider evil, no? Would you prefer that abortion be illegal, but common in practice, or that it be legal but rare?
Also, consider that decades of politicians being “tough on crime” didn’t solve crime, but instead led to mass incarceration. Simply announcing that you’re against crime and banishing anyone who does it doesn’t work. The same applies here; outright banning abortion is a blunt and ineffective tool. Instead, the goal is to create conditions that affirm life and make it so no mother would ever need to get an abortion.
Very, very few mothers “need” to get an abortion. They choose to. There are many ways of discouraging this choice, and one hopes our society would pursue all of them. Far and away the most obvious, impactful and easily justifiable is to make it illegal.
covidkid has his finger on the pulse, but I would like to make an even clearer distinction. There do exist rare circumstances in which an early delivery (usually by c-section) is medically necessary to save the mother’s life. Yes, the child might die – this is a horrible, tragic reality. But this is fundamentally different from an abortion, which is the intentional killing of a human life.
Abortion is fundamentally evil because it violates the right which presupposes all other rights – namely, the right to life. For that reason alone, it should be illegal. The fact that its practice will persist regardless of its legality is very sad, but it is hardly a reason against outlawing abortion. Lots of heinous evils acts occur despite being illegal – would you ever argue “Well, it’s not worth outlawing theft / rape / murder / etc. because it’ll happen anyway?” Of course not. It is a silly proposition with no limiting principle. (And I defy your insinuation that abortion will be either “legal but rare” or “illegal but in common practice.” Has anything ever become MORE readily available after becoming illegal?)
Thank you. You make a crucial distinction that exposes the real intentions of abortion on demand, which is masked in medical language but isn’t actually about medicine.
You’re right: understood as as the intentional killing of a human life, abortion is truly never required. What is required is early delivery of a fetus to save the life of the mother. (Sometimes by C-section, but often not.) Sometimes early delivery must occur at extreme prematurity, but healthcare should always be provided to the baby because the age at which a premature infant can survive independent of the mother continues to decrease — now just 21 weeks.
Thank you Rose for the informative well written article.Abortion has been the lazy cowards way of not taking responsibility for your own actions.In this day there is almost no excuse for unwanted pregnancies.There are cases of rape,incest that are of real concern but they are rare compared to the real reasons for the high numbers of abortions now.That is not just my opinion….it is fact. I was an exotic dancer for ten years…so I have seen this abortion excuse far more than the average person,one person I worked with had 11 abortions by the age of 29 years old….her excuse was birth control pills mess my system up! Killing an innocent child is not in anyway I’m powering for a woman…just the opposite it is against nature and whether you will Amit it or not ,unless you are mentally defective in some form,you will regret it ….you cannot hide the fact of sadisticly murdering an innocent child from yourself!