The West Virginia Senate is advancing a bill that would force schools to show students an anti-abortion propaganda film produced by an extreme “pro-life” group that became infamous for secretly videotaping Planned Parenthood consultations and crusading to end federal funding for the provider.
SB 468 would require schools to show the video “Meet Baby Olivia,” produced by the anti-abortion group Live Action, to all eighth graders and tenth graders as part of a lesson on “human development.” (An earlier version required the roughly three-minute video be shown to third, fifth and eighth graders).
It isn’t necessarily wrong to teach kids how humans develop in the womb — especially as part of a comprehensive sex-ed course that teaches more than just abstinence. However, “Meet Baby Olivia” is pure anti-abortion propaganda.
The video is narrated by a British-sounding woman who tells viewers life begins at fertilization and all physical characteristics, including gender (yes, it uses “gender” instead of “sex”), are determined at this moment. The video then launches into a flawed timeline of fetal development inside the womb.
When the medical community calculates fetal development, it does so starting at the first day of a woman’s menstrual cycle. According to information from the Cleveland Clinic and Mount Sinai Hospital: A woman’s period makes up the first week. The second week is when the ovaries release an egg, and this is when she is most likely to conceive. Week 3 is when a fertilized egg begins to develop into a zygote, then into a blastocyst. Week 4 is when that blastocyst implants itself into the uterine wall. Week 5 is the “embryonic period” when the most basic structures start to develop, including the “heart” tube. Week 6 is when ultrasound may detect a “heartbeat.”
“Meet Baby Olivia” starts counting development “one week after fertilization” when the blastocyst implants in the uterine wall. While the video occasionally throws in a “[blank] weeks after fertilization,” it labels the images with “[blank] weeks” — obviously meant to imitate the way the medical community tracks development.
Due to this tricky language, every developmental stage is presented as happening much earlier in pregnancy than it does by medical standards. It presents the “heartbeat” as being detectible at 3 weeks, but that’s not until 5 or 6 weeks. Even Live Action’s founder Lila Rose tweeted she heard her baby’s heartbeat for the first time at 7 weeks.
Perhaps one of the most egregious lies it tells is that this quarter-inch, tadpole-shaped embryo starts moving at 6 weeks. Movement does not start until at least 11 weeks — or 9 weeks, if we match the video’s timeline. The video also says hiccupping starts at 6 weeks — something that doesn’t happen until 19 weeks, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
The video also tries to portray what is now a fetus as kicking and bouncing around the womb at 11 weeks. Such intense movement doesn’t start until “the quickening” between 17 and 20 weeks (which the video falsely reports as 14-17 weeks). Mothers generally can’t feel these movements until 19-21 weeks.
The video then shows the incredibly inaccurate image of a nearly fully formed baby, complete with a full head of hair, at 20 weeks and says it can live outside the womb. That is not what a fetus looks like at 20 weeks (or even 23 weeks). At that point, it still has another four months before it’s considered ready for birth.
That’s another of the video’s tricks: It not only shows images more advanced than the stage of development, it also shows everything at roughly the same size, so the blastocyst at the start is only slightly smaller than the fetus at the end, drawing a false visual equivalence between the two.
We can reasonably disagree about if or when abortion is appropriate. But we must start with shared facts, and this video is filled with falsehoods.
The purpose of this video is not to educate — it is to indoctrinate. This anti-abortion group wants to train people to imagine a newborn at 20 weeks so it can justify banning abortion long before viability outside the womb. It wants to convince people there’s a heartbeat at 3 weeks, so it when it pushes for “heartbeat” bills, abortion will effectively be banned at conception.
If you think it’s wrong to force political propaganda into our schools, contact Senate President Craig Blair at craig.blair@wvsenate.gov or call 304-357-7801.
