 | |
| Founded | 2003 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Lila Rose |
| Type | 501(c)(3) non-profit |
| Focus | Anti-abortion activism |
Area served | United States |
President | Lila Rose |
| Website | https://www.liveaction.org/ |
Live Action is an American 501(c)3 nonprofit anti-abortion organization founded by Lila Rose. Live Action is known for its anti-abortion activism and posting of undercover videos taken at Planned Parenthood. Live Action seeks to outlaw abortion nationwide and to defund Planned Parenthood. [1] [2]
In 2003, at the age of 15, Rose founded Live Action and began giving presentations to schools and youth groups. [3] While a freshman at UCLA, she partnered with conservative activist James O'Keefe to conduct undercover videos of abortion providers. They conducted their first undercover video in a Planned Parenthood clinic in 2007 in Los Angeles. [4]
In 2009, Rose posted a video of herself posing as a 13-year-old girl, impregnated by her 31-year-old boyfriend, seeking an abortion at a Planned Parenthood in Bloomington, Indiana. After the video was released, the Herald-Times reported that the aide was fired. Rose also went to a clinic in Indianapolis, Indiana, where the video appears to show a staffer informing her that she can receive an abortion in Illinois, which has no parental consent laws related to abortion. This staffer was fired too. Planned Parenthood accused the videos of the Indianapolis sting of being deceptively edited, but Rose told journalists she uploaded the full unedited video on her website. Planned Parenthood denied Rose's accusations of widespread enabling of the exploitation of minors, but acknowledged that mistakes can be made. [5]
In 2010, Live Action released a video taken at a Planned Parenthood in Birmingham, Alabama of a woman claiming to be a 14-year-old girl seeking an abortion, impregnated by her 31-year old boyfriend. The video led to Alabama State officials putting the Planned Parenthood in question on probation for one year. [6]
Live Action gained attention in February 2011 for undercover videos at multiple Planned Parenthood affiliates. The videos show Planned Parenthood staff counseling an investigator posing as a pimp on how to procure clandestine abortions and STD testing for his underage sex workers. [7] According to spokespeople at Planned Parenthood, the organization reported the activities of the individuals involved to the Federal Bureau of Investigation before the videos were made public. Neither the Justice Department nor the FBI would confirm that an investigation was launched. [8] [9] After the video releases, Planned Parenthood denied Live Action's allegations that they condone or support sexual slavery and statutory rape. They also fired one of the employees in question. [10] [11]
In May 2012, Live Action released a video showing an employee at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Austin, Texas advising a woman pretending to be pregnant and seeking an abortion if her fetus was female when she wanted a male (sex-selective abortion), that Planned Parenthood will not deny the woman an abortion no matter her reasons for wanting it. [12] After the video was released, Planned Parenthood stated that the staffer in the video "did not follow our protocol" for dealing with "a highly unusual patient scenario," fired the employee, and stated that "all staff members at this affiliate were immediately scheduled for retraining in managing unusual patient encounters." [12]
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. [13] The video release coincided with intense media scrutiny of the ongoing Kermit Gosnell murder trial. These include a video where a Washington, D.C. abortion doctor, admits that he would let a child die if born alive during an abortion. [14] [15] [16]
Abortion-rights commentators have accused Live Action of editing the Inhuman videos in an intentionally misleading manner, although Live Action also provides full, unedited footage for public viewing. [17] William Saletan of Slate criticized Live Action's Inhuman videos as "orchestrated to embarrass doctors and their clinics" and edited to take out footage "showing the true complexity of abortion and the people who do it" in a video showing some of the unused clips. [17]
In January 2017, Live Action released a video of multiple Planned Parenthood locations purportedly failing to live up to their stated mission by not offering comprehensive prenatal care. In response, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood stated that the organization never claimed to offer prenatal care at all of their locations. [18]
Live Action has advocated to deny federal and state funding to Planned Parenthood, claiming they cover up sexual abuse of children. [19] [20]
Following Live Action's release of undercover videos in Planned Parenthood clinics, the U.S. House of Representatives approved in February 2011 an amendment by Republican Rep. Mike Pence to cut federal funding to Planned Parenthood. [21] [22]
Live Action has the largest social media presence of any nonprofit anti-abortion organization. The organization has been subject to restrictions from multiple social media platforms. [23]
In 2017, Twitter restricted Live Action from advertising on the platform, flagging Live Action's content as "sensitive." [24] In June 2019, Pinterest permanently banned Live Action for spreading "harmful misinformation, [which] includes medical misinformation and conspiracies that turn individuals and facilities into targets for harassment or violence," following allegations by Live Action that Pinterest had restricted its content by placing it on a list of "blocked pornography sites," per a whistleblower at the social media platform. Pinterest did not specify which Live Action content prompted the ban. [25] In August 2019, Live Action sent cease-and-desist letters to Pinterest and YouTube alleging discrimination in suppressing Live Action content and videos. [26] That same month, Facebook fact-checkers marked as "false" two Live Action videos that stated "abortion is never medically necessary." After Live Action and a group of Republican senators challenged this move as politically motivated censorship, an internal review took place and Facebook retracted the false markers on the videos. [27]
On January 30, 2020, video-sharing social networking service TikTok banned Live Action's channel "due to multiple Community Guidelines violations" after the group posted a video of a woman choosing between an anti-abortion-rights and pro-abortion-rights pill, a meme derived from the film The Matrix . By the next day, TikTok restored Live Action's account, calling the block a "mistake" based on "human error by a moderator." [28]
In May 2019, Live Action members held a protest in Philadelphia to rally against alleged harassment of abortion rights opponents by Representative Brian Sims in videos he made and published online. [29]
The Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc. (PPFA), or simply Planned Parenthood, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that provides reproductive and sexual healthcare, and sexual education in the United States and globally. It is a member of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF).
Anti-abortion violence is violence committed against individuals and organizations that perform abortions or provide abortion counseling. Incidents of violence have included destruction of property, including vandalism; crimes against people, including kidnapping, stalking, assault, attempted murder, and murder; and crimes affecting both people and property, as well as arson and terrorism, such as bombings.
Lila Grace Rose is an American anti-abortion activist who is the founder and president of the anti-abortion organization Live Action. She has conducted undercover, investigative exposés of abortion facilities in the United States, including affiliates of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Abby Johnson is an American anti-abortion activist who previously worked at Planned Parenthood as a clinic director, but resigned in October 2009. She states that she resigned after watching an abortion on ultrasound. The veracity of her account and the details and motivation for her conversion have been challenged by investigative reporters, as medical records contradict some of her claims.
David Robert Daleiden is an American anti-abortion activist who worked for Live Action before founding the Irvine, California-based Center for Medical Progress in 2013.
The Center for Medical Progress (CMP) is an anti-abortion organization founded by David Daleiden in 2013. The CMP is best known for producing undercover recordings that prompted a controversy over Planned Parenthood in 2015; CMP established a fake company to pose as buyers of fetal tissue and secretly recorded Planned Parenthood officials during meetings.
In 2015, an anti-abortion organization named the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) released several videos that had been secretly recorded. Members of the CMP posed as representatives of a biotechnology company in order to gain access to both meetings with abortion providers and abortion facilities. The videos showed how abortion providers made fetal tissue available to researchers, although no problems were found with the legality of the process. All of the videos were found to be altered, according to analysis by Fusion GPS and its co-founder Glenn R. Simpson, a former investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal. The CMP disputed this finding, attributing the alterations to the editing out of "bathroom breaks and waiting periods". CMP had represented a longer version of the tapes as being "complete", as well as a shorter, edited version. The analysis by Fusion GPS concluded that the longer version was also edited, with skips and missing footage. Nonetheless, the videos attracted widespread media coverage; after the release of the first video, conservative lawmakers in Congress singled out Planned Parenthood and began to push bills that would strip the organization of federal family planning funding. No such attempts by Congress to cut federal family planning money from Planned Parenthood have become law. Conservative politicians in several states have also used this as an opportunity to cut or attempt to cut family planning funding at the state level.
On November 27, 2015, a mass shooting occurred in a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, resulting in the deaths of three people and injuries to nine. A police officer and two civilians were killed; five police officers and four civilians were injured. After a standoff that lasted five hours, police SWAT teams crashed armored vehicles into the lobby and the attacker surrendered.
Abortion in Texas is illegal in most cases, except to save the mother's life, or prevent substantial impairment of major bodily function. A trigger law has been in effect since August 25, 2022, which bans abortion in all cases except to save the life of the mother.
ByteDance Ltd. is a Chinese internet technology company headquartered in Beijing and incorporated in the Cayman Islands.
TikTok, whose mainland Chinese counterpart is Douyin, is a short-form video hosting service owned by ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from 3 seconds to 10 minutes.
Unplanned is a 2019 American drama film written and directed by Cary Solomon and Chuck Konzelman. It is based on the disputed 2011 memoir Unplanned by anti-abortion activist Abby Johnson. The film stars Ashley Bratcher as Johnson, following her life as a clinic director for Planned Parenthood and her subsequent transition to anti-abortion activism.
Abortion in Illinois is legal. Laws about abortion dated to the early 1800s in Illinois; the first criminal penalties related to abortion were imposed in 1827, and abortion itself became illegal in 1867. As hospitals set up barriers in the 1950s, the number of therapeutic abortions declined. Following Roe v. Wade in 1973, Illinois passed a number of restrictions on abortion, many of which have subsequently been repealed. Illinois updated its existing abortion laws in June 2019. The state has seen a decline in the number of abortion clinics over the years, going from 58 in 1982 to 47 in 1992 to 24 in 2014.
Abortion in Kentucky is illegal. There were laws in Kentucky about abortion by 1900, including ones with therapeutic exceptions. In 1998, the state passed legislation that required clinics to have an abortion clinic license if they wanted to operate. By the early 2010s, members of the Kentucky Legislature attempted to ban abortion in almost all cases and had also introduced the early abortion bans. Prior to 2019, Kentucky law prohibited abortions after week 22. This changed when the state legislature passed a law that moved the prohibition to week 6 in the early part of the year. In that year, 57% of people in Kentucky said abortion should be "illegal in all or most cases." A bill passed and made effective in April 2022 lowered the threshold to 15 weeks, the second most restrictive limit in effect in the United States behind Texas, and introduced regulations that made abortion illegal until it was blocked in federal court.
Abortion in Michigan is legal throughout all stages of pregnancy. A state constitutional amendment to explicitly guarantee abortion rights was placed on the ballot in 2022 as Michigan Proposal 22–3; it passed with 57 percent of the vote, adding the right to abortion and contraceptive use to the Michigan Constitution. The amendment largely prevents the regulation of abortion before fetal viability, unless said regulations are to protect the individual seeking an abortion, and it also makes it unconstitutional to make laws restricting abortions which would protect the life and health, physical and/or mental, of the pregnant individual seeking abortion.
Abortion in South Dakota is illegal. Anyone who induces an abortion is guilty of a Class 6 felony. An exception is included to "preserve the life of the pregnant female," given appropriate and reasonable medical judgment.
Abortion in Florida is currently legal until the 15th week of gestation under legislation signed by Governor Ron DeSantis. Since 1989, the Florida Supreme Court has held that Article 1, Section 23 of the Florida Constitution protects access to abortion. This means that, despite the United States Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, abortion remains legal in Florida. However, on April 13, 2023, the Florida Legislature passed and Governor DeSantis signed into law the Heartbeat Protection Act, which outlaws abortion after 6 weeks, with exceptions for rape, incest, human trafficking, a diagnosis of a fatal fetal abnormality, and when required to save the pregnant woman's life or protect her health. The Act takes effect if the state Supreme Court upholds the 15-week ban, currently being challenged.
Abortion in Iowa is legal up to 20 weeks of gestation. A 6-week abortion ban has been indefinitely blocked in court.
In 2020, the United States government announced that it was considering banning the Chinese social media platform TikTok upon a request from then-president Donald Trump, who viewed the app as a national security threat. The result was that TikTok owner ByteDance—which initially planned on selling a small portion of TikTok to an American company—agreed to divest TikTok to prevent a ban in the United States and in other countries where restrictions are also being considered due to privacy concerns, which themselves are mostly related to its ownership by a firm based in China.
Suggesting that she wants to have an abortion if the fetus turns out to be a girl, the visitor asks the staffer how soon she can detect the gender with an ultrasound. "The abortion covers you up until 23 weeks, and usually at 5 months is usually when they detect, you know, whether or not it's a boy or a girl," the Planned Parenthood staffer explains. The staffer answers all of the woman's questions honestly and makes it clear that Planned Parenthood will not deny the woman an abortion despite her reasons for wanting to have one. ... A Planned Parenthood spokeswoman told The Huffington Post on Tuesday the staffer in the video "did not follow our protocol" for dealing with "a highly unusual patient scenario." ... "Within three days of this patient interaction, the staff member's employment was ended and all staff members at this affiliate were immediately scheduled for retraining in managing unusual patient encounters.
Pence took his fight against Planned Parenthood to the next level after the release of a series of videos by the group Live Action –videos that they say show Planned Parenthood employees advising actors posing as pimps on information on how to get abortions, STD testing and birth control for their underage prostitutes.
Planned Parenthood's role as a major abortion provider has long provoked fierce opposition, but this month its opponents broadened their attacks, seeking to discredit the organization by linking it to the sexual exploitation of minors. A group called Live Action, which has repeatedly taken aim at Planned Parenthood and receives support from conservative foundations, released undercover videotapes in which clinic employees are seen answering questions from a man posing as a sex trafficker. Planned Parenthood says the tapes are misleading, that an errant staff member was fired and that its affiliates reported the encounters to law enforcement.
