Last month I spoke with the pro-life activist Lila Rose in front of a live audience at the Catholic University of America. We were there to talk about the future of the pro-life movement, and the students in attendance had a lot of questions. I had my own questions, too. Was the pro-life movement really prepared for the fall of Roe v. Wade? Is Donald Trump actually a pro-life president? And in a society that’s rapidly polarizing along gender lines, what does the pro-life movement have to say to young women in particular? We got into those and many other subjects.
Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ross Douthat: Lila Rose, welcome to the stage at Catholic University, and welcome to “Interesting Times.”
Lila Rose: Thank you so much. I’m thrilled to be here, both for Catholic University and the interesting times that we’re in.
Douthat: That’s right. And we’re here to discuss the politics of abortion and the position of the pro-life movement a few years after Roe v. Wade was overturned. I want to know what you think the pro-life future looks like here in the second Trump administration.
But since this is a podcast, I’m going to start by asking you a little bit about your own biography. You’re the founder of Live Action, a pro-life organization, and you founded it when you were 15 years old.
Rose: Correct.
Douthat: So what was Live Action at the beginning, when you didn’t have your driver’s license yet?
Rose: [Chuckles.] Well, because I didn’t have my driver’s license, it was a group of other 15-year-olds, maybe some 16-year-olds, in my parents’ living room. Fellow students. And we were determined to just make a difference of some kind about abortion because I became very convicted that this was the human rights issue of our day.
And I had found this book in my parents’ home which basically had the history since Roe v. Wade and before that of abortion in America. It had images of fetal development and it also had images of abortion victims. And I was just very compelled that I needed to do something about the issue because I had never heard it talked about in my church growing up — I was raised evangelical. I rarely heard it talked about anywhere else. My parents were pro-life, but they were not activists.
Douthat: Where did you grow up?
Rose: San Jose, Calif. So, early Silicon Valley days. My dad was in software programming and we were very much in some ways a normal family. In other ways, not — I’m one of eight kids, so we were pro-life. They were living the pro-life conviction very beautifully by having so many kids.
All that is to say, I thought: OK, there’s 3,000 abortions a day. This has been legal since before I was born. I find out there’s a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic committing abortions up to 24 weeks within 10 miles of where I grew up, and no one seemed to say or do anything about it.
So I said I want to do something. I was interested in a lot of other causes. I was a normal kid otherwise, trying to get through high school, but I thought I got to do something, and that was the origin of Live Action.
Douthat: So I think the point at which you came to national prominence was a little bit later, when you were in college. You became famous for basically going undercover at Planned Parenthood. What were you doing in those days?
Rose: While a freshman at U.C.L.A., I was inspired to do more pro-life activism and started Live Action U.C.L.A.
Planned Parenthood was at the time especially seen as this great organization serving women’s health care. People didn’t really understand it’s the biggest abortion chain — they’re providing abortions, which end human lives. That inspired me to say: I want to expose this. I want to get people talking about this.
I started a magazine on campus and started doing investigative reporting as best I knew how.
Then I ended up going undercover into Los Angeles Planned Parenthood facilities to expose the connection between underage girls who are pregnant and abusers. Unfortunately, I’d been doing all this research and saw this horrible pattern of these court cases where girls would sue Planned Parenthood or name them in their lawsuits for the sexual abuse coverup that they endured at abortion clinics, because they were taken by their abusers when they were pregnant, and instead of reporting it — there’s mandatory reporting laws for sexual abuse — the Planned Parenthood would cover up the abuse, and then they would send the girl home back to the abuser. She’d come back for a repeat abortion; horrible cycles continued.
I started compiling the footage of them covering up the abuse, saying they wouldn’t report it and they’d get me a secret abortion.
Douthat: How old were you at that point?
Rose: Eighteen. It wasn’t hard to be 15. [Chuckles.] It was easy back then.
Douthat: And you would tell them a back story basically?
Rose: Yes, exactly. And then when we started to report that, it took up a life of its own, mostly through YouTube and some independent media. Some of the more mainstream media started to cover it when Planned Parenthood had threatened to sue me at the time for the investigative reporting.
As time went on, I started doing investigative reporting across the country. We launched Live Action News, and since then, we’ve been reporting now for the last almost two decades.
Douthat: Let’s go from there to a kind of Pro-Life 101. I’m going to ask you some very simple questions now: Why is abortion wrong?
Rose: So I would say abortion’s wrong — you can do a very simple logical syllogism. First, it’s always wrong to intentionally take an innocent human life. And I found that most people agree with that. Virtually everyone I speak to agrees with that; it’s always wrong to intentionally take an innocent human life. Abortion intentionally takes an innocent human life. So then, the conclusion of those premises is: Therefore, abortion is always wrong.
Now, some people, of course, are going to take issue with that second sentence, that second premise. You can argue their potential, you can say that they’re not the same value as a born life. Certainly they have potential, but it is undeniable scientifically that they are alive and they are human. They are a human life. You wouldn’t have to have an abortion to end the pregnancy if they were not a human life.
That is why in the pro-life movement we oppose the murder — we consider it murder — of preborn children: for the same reasons we oppose the murder of those that are born.
Douthat: And what would you argue to someone who listens to that and says: Well, surely there’s some kind of ambiguous ground in there? Someone who says: Look, I can accept that abortion kills an organism that is a member of the species Homo sapiens, and I can even accept that that might be wrong, but I don’t think that that rises to the level of what we think about when we think about homicide, murder and so on.
Rose: Yes.
Douthat: I think usually when people make this argument, if they push it through, they end up saying something like: There is some feature of humanity — awareness, consciousness, brain development and so on — that is just not there in the tiniest embryos.
I think there’s a lot of people who have a hard time seeing the tiniest embryos as the equivalent of an infant or an adult human being. What’s your response to that quest for a kind of “wrong but not murder” perspective on the subject?
Rose: Yes. And of course we get that all the time. That’s the common objection: It’s just not the same, it’s just not the same. They’re different. It’s different. The entities, when they’re unborn, for all of these reasons are different.
And I think you can categorize all of those reasons under the acronym SLED. SLED stands for size, level of development, environment and degree of dependency. And these are the only four distinguishing factors between a preborn child — or preborn life — and a born life.
Of course, size is different — you already referenced that the embryo is clearly smaller than a born child. A newborn child is clearly smaller than a toddler, who’s clearly smaller than you or me — I’m smaller than you. I’m shorter.
Douthat: Indeed.
[Audience chuckles.]
Rose: And our size does not determine our value as human lives, and it certainly should not determine our legal status. So there is size.
Then there is level of development. It is clear that an embryo is less developed than a fetus, and a fetus is less developed than a newborn, a newborn than a toddler, than an adolescent, than an adult, et cetera. But your level of development as a human life — we all begin life as a single-cell embryo, and we will end life, hopefully, in our gray old glory years when we die peacefully in our beds. That’s what we hope.
Douthat: I intend to die at the podcast mic.
Rose: Oh, no, that sounds quite dramatic!
[Audience laughs.]
Douthat: No, I’m joking.
Rose: But our level of development also does not determine or negate our humanity. We are humans that are developing. And if you, again, tie legal status or basic human rights — like life, the right to not be killed — to our level of development, then I would say it’s an elitist society where the strong get to have tyranny over the weak.
Then there’s environment. Clearly the child in the womb is in the womb, not outside the womb. A lot of people say: Well, birth is personhood. You’re suddenly a life outside of the womb and you have legal status — but your environment in any other context wouldn’t determine your humanity because you’re born in a different country, born to a different family, or you’re in a different location. That doesn’t change your humanity.
And then finally, your degree of dependency. It is clear — and this is the big one, bodily autonomy — they’re totally dependent on the mother. Therefore, the mother should have the power to end the life of her child in the womb — but only in the womb, not a newborn. We are all dependent in one way or another. You are dependent, myself, we are dependent on people who we can get food from. And otherwise, if we can’t get our food, we would die.
A newborn is certainly dependent on his or her parents, and those parents have to use their bodies to care for that newborn, or the surrogate adult that they transfer care to. And an unborn child is totally dependent — completely dependent — on his or her mother, but that doesn’t change his or her humanity. In fact, I would argue that proves their humanity because that’s how we all start life. That is the nature of a human being, to be interdependent and to start life totally dependent and, often, to end life totally dependent.
So when you look at the acronym of SLED, you can see none of these differentiators between an unborn human and a born human mean that there should be less value assigned or a differing legal status. Both are human and both deserve fundamental human rights.
Douthat: I’ve always thought that the dependence question has ended up being where a lot of the legal and political arguments have rested, because it is connected to the idea that it is in effect illegitimate for the government to ask women to carry the unique burden of having this life that is so dependent on them, that is literally inside them. You’ve had three children; you’re aware of the substantial burden that pregnancy involves.
I do think the level of development argument is the place where there is a kind of intuition that people have, that until you have consciousness, you have not passed some kind of threshold into humanity. And obviously, a problem there is that no one knows exactly when consciousness begins, but someone sitting here arguing with you could say: Fine, I think the S, the E and the D make a good case against second- or third-trimester abortion. But are you really telling me that the 28-cell organism that clearly doesn’t seem conscious at all has attained a status where you have to grant it full legal rights?
Rose: Well, and I would say: Listen, to judge the single-cell embryo as somehow not up to par because they’re not at 20 or 24 weeks yet or whatever you put as your arbitrary marker for consciousness, I don’t think there’s any good argument for that. Of course, consciousness is very special about humans, that we eventually develop it, but humans can go in and out of consciousness. Humans can have varying degrees of consciousness. A newborn clearly has far less consciousness than they do just a year later, and certainly less than an adult.
I would argue that’s a very arbitrary standard. First of all, you can’t, again, put a line in the gestational time of pregnancy and say this is exactly when it happened. So it’s also very dangerous to say, well, that’s going to be my line for telling someone they have legal value or not — because you don’t know when it is, exactly.
I just don’t buy that argument. I don’t find it compelling. I understand people want a line in the sand that they can draw to say some abortion is OK.
And I think the question we should ask is: Why do we want that so badly? That, I think, is the interesting discussion. Why is America so hooked on abortion?
Douthat: But a lot of people would say that if people want it, they want it because they associate legal abortion with what gets described as the language of reproductive rights, reproductive freedom, but which is fundamentally about female equality in what was historically a male-dominated society. Roe v. Wade was decided during a particular surge of feminism and female advancement in American society.
I think it’s very hard for a lot of people to imagine a world where abortion is restricted as it was in 1955, but with the landscape of female achievement and opportunity that you have in the 2020s. Do you think there’s a tension there?
Rose: I think that the tension is an unnecessary one. I think we’ve walked ourselves into a brick wall and we didn’t need to do it. The mistake of feminism — and not first-wave feminism; I think the first wave was beautiful — but then, as we went further down the waves with feminism, the mistake was to say: Well, now I need to be the same as men. Not just have equal status under the law, but now I need to be the same. So if a man can’t get pregnant, then I shouldn’t have to get pregnant. If we have sex and he’s not pregnant and then I get pregnant, then I should be able to disappear the pregnancy.
That’s not reality. The reality is that men and women are different. And when you get pregnant, you’re pregnant with a new human life that also has rights and bodily autonomy and a whole lifetime of choices in front of them.
When we play the game of unreality, that men and women are the same and should always be treated the same bodily in terms of what they can do with their bodies or reproductive systems, it’s just a mistake. That’s one of the reasons why, of course, we have one million abortions a year now, because we’re not living in reality.
I would argue that what’s truly pro-women, and certainly going to make for a more just and loving society, is to acknowledge the differences between men and women and acknowledge what sex does. Because I think this is the root of the issue: We see sex today — and this was the sexual revolution on steroids, the free love movement — that sex should be divorced at all times for adult pleasure, as long as there’s consent, whatever that means; it should be divorced from consequences, responsibility and certainly procreation.
That’s not reality either, because sex creates new life and sex is incredibly bonding and sex is also, I think, sacred and belongs in lifelong commitment, which is why historically we’ve valued sex and marriage as something really special where it belongs. That’s what I would say is a tragic mistake we’ve made, and that’s why people now have this view of sex as recreational and they’ve lowered the bar for its value. The next step is you say human life isn’t valuable. This was a huge error that feminism, when it started to get married to the free love movement, the sexual revolution movements. It wasn’t always like that, but when they started to get married, those movements became very toxic for both women and now, certainly, for children.
Douthat: We live on the far side of the sexual revolution. I think any plausible world where abortion is restricted is not going to be a world where you have an immediate return to large-scale premarital chastity. So it is most likely going to be a world where you have a lot of pregnancies in difficult circumstances that, under current conditions, would end in abortion.
You’re talking about reality. A core reality of difference between men and women is that in a situation where there’s an unplanned or unexpected pregnancy, women do bear a burden that men don’t bear. What is the responsibility of society, government, public policy to be cognizant of that and provide some kind of special support? Is that an obligation? In the pro-life argument, is there a case for a kind of public provision of support for women who are being asked to carry pregnancies?
Rose: I would say absolutely, yes. Part of Life Action’s advocacy is, certainly, we want to abolish abortion. Legal abortion is at its core unjust, and it should not be permitted. Abortion should not be permitted, but I do think the government should provide — there should be safety nets for people that find themselves in tough situations to support children.
I also think there should be public policy to encourage marriage because I’m not so, I guess, pessimistic about the future when it comes to ——
Douthat: I’m talking about just the short-term future.
Rose: Even the short term ——
Douthat: If you pass an anti-abortion law in the District of Columbia or the state of California tomorrow, in the next two years, what does the landscape look like?
Rose: Well, we know in states like Texas that have banned abortion — there were about 12 states where the laws kicked in after Dobbs v. Jackson, where they were able to ban most or virtually all abortions — you saw tens of thousands of lives saved. So there are lives being saved because of pro-life laws and people who choose not to abort.
I mean, there was a feature piece on a young woman who was in Texas right after Dobbs v. Jackson and couldn’t get an abortion because it was illegal now, so she had twins. And they painted the picture as a very dire one. And it was like: Wait, she had these beautiful twins, and they have their whole life in front of them. We could celebrate that.
The point is, pro-life laws absolutely do prevent abortions. If abortion is provided effectively as backup contraception — that’s how it’s used today, and I think we should be very realistic about that. Fifty percent of women who have abortions are using contraception when they get pregnant, the month that they get pregnant. And the idea that contraception is going to save lives ultimately, somehow, because it’s going to prevent abortions? No, it’s created this mind-set that, again, sex is not for marriage; it can be for pleasure and you can just use abortion as backup contraception.
You can change the mind-set. And we’ve seen this after Dobbs — we saw huge social media campaigns of people saying now: We’re going to be abstinent because we can’t basically use abortion as backup contraception. I mean, they didn’t say the quiet part out loud, but that’s what it was. So I do think ——
Douthat: Sometimes they said they wouldn’t date a Republican. That line may have also ——
Rose: There’s that, too.
Douthat: And I took that personally.
[Audience laughs.]
Douthat: No, sorry. I’m trying to basically sketch out what you might call a kind of ideal pro-life vision, before we descend to the realities of politics right now. So the last question on that is: In an ideal world, what kinds of exceptions around abortion are permissible from a pro-life perspective, if any?
Rose: So when we’re talking about direct and intentional taking of an innocent life, there’s no exception that can be just. This is highly controversial for some, because we’ve been trained to think that abortion is somehow medically necessary. And I’m not talking about the removal of an ectopic pregnancy. In that case, the child’s growing in a hostile environment. The intention is not to take their life — you have to remove the child, anyway. It’s not going to be able to survive there. The mother’s life is threatened.
I’m also not talking about miscarriage care, where the baby’s heart has already stopped beating. Removing that baby during a procedure is not the direct intentional taking of a life.
But in any other case, if there’s a medical scenario where there is some emergency situation, like the mother is having a health crisis, there’s a whole world of medicine to support and care for both mother and baby and to advocate for both of those lives in a clinical setting. And in very rare cases, in a life-threatening emergency, an early delivery may be necessary of that baby. But in that case, you do everything you can to save, again, both lives.
So it changes entirely the posture of our medical system, which today is basically saying, well, life is disposable. Have the abortion because it’s easier. Have the abortion because the baby’s disabled. Have the abortion because you may have this health complication.
I mean, I have a sibling — beautiful family. My brother who’s married — beautiful kids. One of his children is missing part of his hand because of an amniotic band issue in the womb. Immediately, recommendations to abort were made to him and his wife at 20 weeks. It’s happened to many other friends of mine. People listening probably have had those recommendations in their lives.
The medical system right now is not designed to care for both as patients. It’s designed to treat abortion as somehow a necessity or a go-to. And I think we need to care for them both.
So in no case should abortion be permissible under law.
Douthat: Let’s talk about the bigger realities. Roe was overturned in 2022 in the Dobbs decision. The issue has currently returned fully to the states. Pro-life laws were on the books in a number of states.
But, just to give my own summary of where things stand — and you can react to this — I think the pro-life movement has been maybe more successful in some ways than I expected in defending some of those existing pro-life laws, mostly in red and conservative states. It was also successful in basically averting defeat in 2024 when the Democratic Party was campaigning very straightforwardly on a promise to restore abortion rights. There was a sense that the election could be a referendum on abortion, but in the end, Donald Trump was elected president. So those are, in a sense, pro-life victories.
At the same time, where the abortion issue has come up for a referendum, including in Republican-leaning states, the pro-life movement has lost. There have been, I’d say, at best piecemeal attempts to pass pro-family or mother-supporting legislation of the kind you were suggesting that you support.
Trump himself has very conspicuously kept the pro-life movement at arm’s length. Has accepted a system where abortion pills are available by mail across the country. And into the bargain overall — and this started before Dobbs — the abortion rate has risen in America as a whole.
So you can react to that analysis, or just tell me: Was the pro-life movement prepared for the fall of Roe?
Rose: That’s a very good question. I think in some ways we were prepared, and in other ways we were not. You could say: Well then, you weren’t prepared. A lack of preparedness in any area is a lack of preparedness.
What does that mean concretely? I would say it’s one thing to break an institutionalization of abortion over five decades, which is what happened after Roe. Government got caught up in funding the biggest abortion chain, which is Planned Parenthood, with ultimately hundreds of millions of dollars.
Then academia largely becomes very pro-abortion. You have media becoming very pro-abortion. The New York Times editorial board supports abortion, and most editorial boards do. You have entertainment media supporting abortion. So you have this, I would say, a monolith throughout these different industries, these parts of society that just support abortion. It’s kind of a given.
And if you’re pro-woman, if you’re a feminist, then you have to support abortion. That was another message that I think a lot of women in my generation — millennial women — were sent. That’s not true, by the way. The early feminists were pro-life. But all of that was the messaging, and so when you get this blow to Roe v. Wade — I mean, they didn’t assert the personhood of the child, right? They said, well, the states get to decide this — which was progress, but I don’t think it was full justice.
Douthat: Do you think the Supreme Court should have ruled that the unborn have a right to life under the 14th Amendment?
Rose: Yes. Absolutely, yes. I think the 14th Amendment is very clear that everyone should be given equal protection of our laws, and no state shall have the right to deprive anyone of life and equal protection of the law.
And that’s not happening with the unborn children, who are not being treated as human beings and persons.
So I think they didn’t go far enough. But all that is to say: There was a major backlash. We have to be real about that. There were referendums. In California they passed Proposition 1, and what happened was we basically enshrined abortion yet again — I mean, it wasn’t enshrined to the degree that it was, but we enshrined abortion in our State Constitution.
Now, I’m in a very blue state. We’ve got Gavin Newsom now. Kamala Harris is obviously from California. It’s very far left. That’s the ideology there.
But the pro-life movement has always been a volunteer movement. It is different from virtually every other movement because the victims are all voiceless and have no votes and they’re unborn. So people who are fighting for life — pro-lifers — are called all kinds of names, or in media they can be disparaged or put up in caricatures, but the reality is there are a lot of just good, normal people who themselves are not getting anything from this cause. They’re not advocating for their own rights; they’re advocating for basically other people’s children’s rights.
And the sheer amount of money that the pro-life movement has been outspent by — when you consider Planned Parenthood as a lobbying organization, when you consider the money of the Democratic Party that it threw behind pro-abortion ads in midterms after Dobbs v. Jackson, and then in some of these ballot initiatives to push abortion on demand as part of the state constitutions in some of these states — the pro-life movement was outspent sometimes 10 to one, sometimes 30 to one. And the pro-life movement didn’t have the infrastructure that the Democratic Party has built for abortion, or that Planned Parenthood, quite frankly, has built in their lobbying groups.
Now, is that our fault? Yes. One of the projects of Live Action is working to solve that. But the point is, it’s a David and Goliath-type fight.
Douthat: OK, but that’s a fairly pessimistic narrative, though.
Rose: Well, David won.
Douthat: David won?
Rose: He wins.
[Audience laughs.]
Douthat: Yes, yes, that’s fair. But what advice, then, do you give David? What is the sling and the stone, if we’re going to extend the metaphor?
Rose: Yes, very good question. Yes.
Douthat: Apart from saying: OK, you need better grass-roots organizing, you need better fund-raising, and so on. What is the actual political strategy?
You’re here in D.C. The March for Life just happened. There’s been a lot of argument among pro-lifers about what the Trump administration is or isn’t doing. What is your view of how the Trump administration has handled the abortion issue?
Rose: Yes. I think there’s some absolute wins, and then there’s some yet-to-be-won objectives — I’ll put it that way. And what I mean by that is: There’s things that I think should be happening that haven’t happened yet.
Douthat: Like what?
Rose: The abortion pill should not be on the market.
That’s one of the things that I’m here in D.C. to talk about. We did a press conference on Capitol Hill. We had a meeting with Secretary Kennedy. We have been having meetings with the administration, urging that this be done. And again, it’s highly politicized.
Douthat: Without betraying private confidence, just as a pundit, let’s say — God help you — what do you think is the big impediment?
Rose: The big impediment is that this is the most prevalent kind of abortion today. Six hundred thousand lives were lost by the abortion pill in the last reported year. And women are being told that this is like a period pill. There’s literally a website that’s called Period Pills, basically saying you don’t even have to know if you’re having an abortion; if you just want your period to come more quickly, take mifepristone. There’s so many issues with that. It’s misleading. There’s no informed consent. There’s so many issues with that, but ——
Douthat: But the political problem is if you took this step, it would be seen as a very big national pro-life step. And the administration thinks that would be unpopular.
Rose: But this just shows — yes, some in the administration. Again, there’s so much nuance here. But I do think that this is one of the big lies. I mean, the pro-choice movement originally was supposed to be for women. That was the idea: Give women choices. Right?
What it has become politically is a very extremist movement that only is supported by a small number of Americans. It’s not a majority, in terms of that public policy that they’re promoting: Abortion on demand, without apology, no religious exemptions, taxpayer-funded. It’s been so politicized, is what I’m saying.
Douthat: But again, in terms of the political problem, yes, there is a version of the pro-choice position that is sweeping, comprehensive, and only held by a minority of the country. But the view that abortion should be available in some form is a popular position.
Rose: Yes. We’re hooked on it right now, culturally. And that’s one of the political fights we’re talking about that’s so important, but our biggest focus at Life Action, actually, my personal focus with other projects I’m working on, is really changing the environment that we’re in, one person at a time. It takes people having their own “aha” moments about relationships and sex and purpose and identity, because I think there’s a spiritual sickness and a moral decay that we’re experiencing. And that is the biggest thing to fight. So that’s ——
Douthat: Just to preview the goals of this conversation, I want to end with that question of persuasion.
Rose: Beautiful. I’ll save it.
Douthat: But I want to stay with the political for the moment, because persuasion is, by definition, a long-term project. Maybe not a 50-year project, but at least a long-term project. In the meantime, the pro-life movement needs a way to make political progress, defend the territory that it has, speak to people who are deeply conflicted on the issue.
Is there a zone of incrementalism and compromise that you’re comfortable with in that area?
Rose: Well, I would say the administration has already proven time and time again that they’re willing to go out and do highly controversial things.
[Audience chuckles.]
Douthat: That’s true. They also have a rather low approval rating at the moment, and they might lose ——
Rose: But how much do they care when they have their issue that they are going for because they believe it’s important to the base?
Douthat: Yes.
Rose: So there is a pro-life base. That base matters.
My argument purely politically would be, obviously: Do the right thing, period. That’s always my encouragement. But from a political standpoint, if they want to rally the base, I would say you need to take bold, decisive action. That’s what the base wants to see. They’re seeing it on other issues, different parts of bases, whether it’s ICE and how they’re handling the ICE situation ——
Douthat: They are handling the ICE situation in a way that seems only popular with ——
Rose: I have my gripes with it. A lot of people do, but they’re still doggedly going the route that they choose to go.
Douthat: But why do you think that is? Because it seems like, OK, so there’s a basic pro-life problem of: How do you persuade the moderate, the uncertain, the lukewarm person? But then it seems like what you’re describing is a concrete, internal Republican coalition problem.
And this is not a new thing, I should stress, by the way. For a long time, pro-life activists have said: OK, maybe our issue doesn’t poll incredibly well, but neither do tax cuts for the rich, and the Republican Party is more comfortable passing tax cuts for the rich than protecting the unborn.
So this is not a new issue. But it does seem like there is this energy inside the Trump White House where it’s like: We have to take these steps on immigration, and we don’t care how they poll. Why is abortion different?
Rose: Well, they’ve made some strides on abortion. We have seen some decisive actions: The pardoning of the pro-life prisoners last year.
Douthat: Just to clarify, this was pardons of pro-life protesters who were arrested and convicted ——
Rose: Yes, and put in prison, including grandmothers and mothers. I mean, I know some of them personally. They’re really beautiful, I would say, sacrificial people.
There was the budget last year that President Trump signed, which defunded Planned Parenthood of Medicaid money for one year. That was a big deal. I remember being told two decades ago, or 15 years ago — I don’t remember — when I was first on Capitol Hill as an activist: It’s never going to happen. They’re never going to defund Planned Parenthood. The Republicans love them. Everyone loves them. Good luck with that.
Things seem impossible until they’re done. And I think on the life issue, we have seen big strides. Roe v. Wade was overruled. People told me for years that was going to be impossible. Will we remove the abortion pill from the market? It doesn’t belong on the market. It kills human beings. That’s what it’s designed to do. It doesn’t belong on the market.
So I think it is a matter of time. I think the administration, yes, has been slow to move on some issues, and I’ve been the first to say: Please move faster. Take a stand here ——
Douthat: I’m interested, though, in the extent to which it’s not just about the administration itself, but also about the kind of conservative coalition it’s leading. You have not been making religious arguments for abortion, but it is again — excuse me, we definitely haven’t been making religious arguments for abortion.
Rose: Those are the worst.
[Audience laughs.]
Douthat: But you haven’t been making explicitly religious arguments against abortion. But it is no secret — we’re here on the campus of a Catholic university — that opposition to abortion is very often linked to religious faith. America as a whole, but even American conservatism has become less religious, more secular. As gender polarization has increased, conservatism has become more male-coded.
I think one interesting thing that people who are pro-choice don’t always realize is that a lot of especially early pro-life activism was very female-dominated. You’re an exceptional figure, but not an exceptional figure in that ——
Rose: I feel a daughter of those figures — Nellie Gray, Helen Alvaré, others. Yes.
Douthat: Yeah. So in that sense, though, there’s a way in which a kind of secular male-dominated conservatism is maybe just inherently less interested in the pro-life cause.
Do you think that’s a possibility? And if so, what does the pro-life movement do about that sort of changing reality of the conservative coalition?
Rose: That’s an interesting read. I don’t know that I agree with the read that it’s a fact that it’s male-dominated that makes it ——
Douthat: I’m speculating.
Rose: Yeah. I think there have been plenty of politicians who are women who are squishy on life — on both sides, quite frankly. And certainly on the Democrat side, unfortunately. They’re very locked in on supporting abortion, which is tragic ——
Douthat: And there are many, obviously, very pro-life men. I just think of it as like, I go on the internet, right? I’m familiar with what Gen Z right-wingers on social media are talking about. And it is immigration, civilizational battles, arguments about Israel, race, racism — these kinds of things. This is sort of the zone of debate, and abortion doesn’t seem central to that. Just as an observer.
Rose: Interesting. I would have a slightly different view, for better and for worse. I do think there’s an identity crisis happening on the right — I agree with you on that. There are internal factions forming about: What are we going to be? What do we support?
And I’m sure there’s been variations of that on the left, too. So it kind of is a problem ongoing.
Douthat: Here and there.
[Audience laughs.]
Rose: And that’s where, if you don’t have ideological consistency, if you don’t have truth, you’re going to end up fraying at the seams. It’s going to fall apart eventually. There needs to be a foundation of truth.
And the truth of the pro-life cause is so foundational to any civilization: Human life has value. Human beings have a right to life. Humans are worth protecting. Children are worth protecting.
But I think on the right, yes, there’s a lot of shiny objects, a lot of new crises that hit, and a lot of things to get passionate about. I do think there is a very strong pro-life core. In the administration, there’s a lot of strong pro-life people who are there, who are like: Mr. Trump, please, let’s get all this stuff done.
And President Trump has all of his other objectives and things he’s working on. He’s let some things pass, which is wonderful — we celebrate that. We obviously need to see more. I don’t think it’s a matter of there not being people who care enough — I think a lot of people care. I do think it is a matter, though, of prioritization. There are competing interests.
That’s why, again, I’m here in D.C. Live Action’s working — and many other pro-life groups — because the children in the womb don’t have a voice. But I think that’s an opportunity for really forming a resolute spiritual identity of: We are not in this just for ourselves. We’re thinking about other people. We are caring about the future generations we may never meet.
And I would say that’s not just a spiritual identity that the Republican Party should have, but I would hope the Democrat Party could find that identity, too. They used to have it, by the way. The Democrats used to be pro-life. That was a flip in the last several decades as well.
So I think it’s going to take a pendulum shift, certainly. It’s going to take activism, advocacy, education, but I do think that shift can and will happen.
Douthat: On that idealistic argument, that’s an argument that’s very hard for me to imagine the current president of the United States making in those terms.
Rose: Himself, you’re saying?
Douthat: Himself, himself. Basic question: Do you think Donald Trump is pro-life?
Rose: He’s told me himself that he supports some abortions. But he’s also said he is pro-life, so I think he has a desire to be seen and to do good things for the country. And I think that some of the things that he has helped accomplish have been very good.
My hope for someone like Donald Trump — President Trump — is that, as he’s surrounded by people who are encouraging him to do the good thing and showing him the data and telling him the base wants this, he’s obviously a very political leader. It’s going to help him with his decision-making. I think we can see future pro-life decisions out of President Trump, I do. I’ve been disappointed and I’ve been critical. I’ve gotten in trouble, certainly.
Douthat: You were very critical during the 2024 campaign ——
Rose: Yes. Yes.
Douthat: When he was already distancing himself from the pro-life cause.
Rose: But you do see him change tone on things.
Douthat: From time to time, yeah. That happens.
Rose: From time to time. I mean, he used to be a pro-abortion liberal. And that’s not some secret. This is clear. President Trump has changed on issues — that’s a fact. Everyone knows that.
Douthat: Talking about persuasion and talking about the idea that ultimately for the pro-life cause to triumph, it can’t be a Republican issue, that it has to be an issue that brings people together across party lines — isn’t that hard to do as long as a figure as polarizing as Donald Trump is seen as the primary spokesman for your cause?
Rose: Well, I don’t think he’s the primary spokesman for our cause. I think he has spoken for the cause. But he has also said things that the cause has been very upset about. So there’s kind of this tension there that everyone I think can see.
But I think there is a narrative, a painting of the brush, to say Donald Trump speaks for all pro-lifers, or President Trump speaks for all, whatever cause or advocacy group that he may align with, at least to some degree — I don’t think that’s fair.
Douthat: I don’t think that’s fair, but I guess I’d put it this way: I think there’s an entanglement that always happens in politics ——
Rose: Of course. Yes.
Douthat: Between the persona of the president, a dominant figure in conservatism, or the right, today — maybe we don’t want to say in conservatism, I’m not sure — and I think it’s fair to say, if you were sketching the ideal spokesman for the idealistic cause that you’re describing, it probably wouldn’t look like Donald Trump.
How do you imagine the pro-life movement escaping being just a conservative cause, just a Republican cause, just a partisan cause? What role can politics play in getting you beyond politics?
Rose: Yes, it’s a very important question you’re asking, and one that we’re always wrestling with. That’s why I consider my work culture first, politics second.
What’s happening is you have thousands of pregnancy resource centers across the country. You have campus movements of hundreds and hundreds of pro-life student chapters on college campuses. You have this movement among churches where people are coming back to the pews and there’s higher Mass attendance — as Catholics here, we talk about Mass — so higher Mass attendance among the cohort of Gen Z-ers in college.
So these are the things that sometimes ——
Douthat: I should note, those statistics are hotly debated. I just did a podcast episode that is available on YouTube that contains a long debate about that.
Rose: On the Mass attendance question?
Douthat: On church attendance and Gen Z and everything — I just want to stipulate that. But just to actually ask a question rather than to just make a comment about other podcast episodes ——
Rose: I’m sure it was a good one.
Douthat: It was wonderful. They’re all good episodes. I love them all equally.
[Audience laughs.]
On that, you mentioned crisis pregnancy centers. We talked about the idea of public support for women, pregnant women, families with children and so on. Is there a world where that becomes a successful form of pro-life outreach?
Rose: Yes. I believe it already is. And that’s the thing: It’s not something that is necessarily picked up by The New York Times, although here we are talking about it on “Interesting Times.” But the pregnancy care center movement and the lives of the heroes and the amazing women choosing life — those sorts of stories, those sorts of movements, that are, I would say, long-term movements that are very much really underground — you don’t really see them, necessarily.
That’s what I see every day, not just as an activist, but as an educator and an advocate.
Douthat: But I’m saying, can politics and policy play a role in elevating that?
Rose: Yes. I think so, yes.
Douthat: Like right now, you would not expect a Republican candidate for president to say: The central plank of my platform is going to be more government funding and support for people working to help women in crisis pregnancies and people with young kids who need help.
Do you think, if it were, it would be a stronger argument for the wavering, the uncertain, the person caught between the pro-choice and pro-life side?
Rose: Yes, I absolutely do. I think making America a more welcoming place to have a family and raise a family is the winning message — for any party, but certainly for the Republicans. And you see that happening with the administration. They’re picking that up: The child tax credit, Trump accounts, conversations about how do we ——
Douthat: The Trump accounts, though, aren’t available when you’re having the baby. These are long-term wealth-building devices, right?
Rose: Right, you’ve got to do it every year for 18 years or whatever the span is. But yeah, I see what you’re saying, that they’re not giving a chunk of cash right when the baby is born, and that would be profoundly helpful for a lot of people. I support tax credits, certainly, but I think there should be direct cash given to parents. That’s what I think.
I think that birth should be free. Here I might sound a little bit not like your typical Republican, but you see this sort of language now happening more on the right. Where if we’re going to be spending taxpayer funds, it should go to what is really an existential crisis that we’re facing, which is our plummeting birthrates. You want to talk about it from the 100,000-foot view, and we want to make America healthier for families and better for parents.
So I think public policy that does focus on that and, yeah, uses taxpayer money — I think that that’s a wonderful thing.
And I do see that happening more on the right. People are talking like this.
Douthat: Yes. On the internet, yes. Less so in Congress. But yes.
Rose: I mean, Vice President JD Vance in his speech at the March for Life was talking about making America a more welcoming place to raise a family, talking about, obviously, the Trump accounts, child tax credits, we want to make it easier to have children. So the language is happening.
Douthat: Yes.
Rose: The policy is going to catch up more, and that’s where we have to get concrete. But I do see that more in the right than I’ve ever seen before in my lifetime.
Douthat: All right, let’s touch on one more concrete form of outreach that loops back to something we were talking about earlier, which is the idea of compromise and middle ground.
I think one of the things that has been most notable about the way the abortion debate has played out since Dobbs has been the focus on difficult pregnancies. Pregnancies where the woman’s health is threatened in some way, where there’s an issue with the pregnancy, where there’s a potential miscarriage and so on. And where there is, what I would describe as a kind of zone of uncertainty about when exceptions for saving the life of the mother kick in, and when doctors are allowed to perform abortions, and so on.
Earlier you talked about essentially the idea that you should be allowed to perform an abortion under ectopic pregnancy conditions. But basically, that’s about it. That there isn’t really any other circumstance where a pregnancy should be treated as life-threatening to the mother and aborted.
That is a very, very unpopular position. It’s also a position that, from my perspective, underplays the deep uncertainty that obtains in situations where health and life are in different ways in the balance. Is there any room for effectively saying: Look, if we are going to restrict abortion, we need to recognize that there has to be a certain kind of latitude for doctors in these circumstances?
Rose: Well, first of all, it’s important to note that the exceptions — the rare cases — for life-threatening emergencies — they’re coded that way, anyway — or rape or incest are less than 3 percent, maybe even less than 1 percent. So I think that’s also just important ground to set, that this has always been used in the political context and the media context as this is why we need abortion, and then you get a million abortions a year ——
Douthat: Absolutely, but it’s been used because it is politically effective. Because people are aware of the inherent uncertainty that hangs over certain medical situations during pregnancy.
I’m just curious. Can the pro-life movement basically say: Look, in those situations, we don’t know exactly which abortions count as saving the life of the mother or not, but for the sake of a larger ban, we are willing to accept that doctors are going to make decisions that we’re not going to second-guess?
Rose: So I think it is in the training of the doctor. When a doctor is committed to both lives and is not secretly like, I want to support abortion liberalization because that’s my agenda that I have — I think it’s a lot easier for a doctor to operate.
I think what we’ve seen in many of these cases that you’re referencing — and we could get specific about one if you’d like. There’s a thousand different factors. There’s a lot of different factors. It is very easy to politicize these cases, and that’s what has happened again and again and again. They’ve become politicized to say: Well, in this case, this woman wasn’t given care because of the pro-life law.
But you start to investigate — and we do this all the time at Live Action News. We work with medical professionals who provide their expert opinion. There’s AAPLOG, which is a pro-life group of obstetricians and gynecologists. There’s the Dublin Declaration, over a thousand medical professionals who say: Abortion — the direct and intentional killing is the definition there — of the child is not medically necessary. We can care for both. There’s ways to care for both.
That really, I think, hasn’t really reached enough people, that there’s ——
Douthat: But in the meantime, you have laws and you have hospitals that have not been trained in these practices, or doctors who disagree with those arguments, right?
Rose: Or they — yeah ——
Douthat: And who are in the position of basically saying: We’re in states that ban abortion. There are life of the mother exceptions. We are not sure what those cover.
And you’ll see hospitals say: Well, we’re going to wait and see and not perform an abortion. And then that yields stories of medical difficulty. I think some of them are blown out of proportion, but some of them are legitimate.
And it seems like your argument would be that in those circumstances, the hospitals are basically just doing the right thing by waiting.
That, again, seems to me ——
Rose: But what I would also say is there’s no investigative energy behind all of the cases where abortions may have been performed and there were also bad outcomes for mom and baby. Certainly for the baby — the baby’s dead. There’s always the worst outcome for the baby, and there’s no energy behind that investigative reporting.
I mean, maternal mortality rates in America are atrocious. They are atrocious. And that’s not because of pro-life laws — that’s because of our health care system.
But the bottom line is this: Abortion is not medically necessary. And this is not my opinion. This is the position of thousands of medical professionals. There are thousands of doctors today who are doing amazing work, caring for both mom and baby. And abortion and early delivery of a baby, where you’re not directly killing the baby but you’re delivering the baby, and the baby might pass away because the baby’s too small for NICU — obviously, that would be a tragedy. That would be a very rare case. If you get the right care, good care, the care you deserve, for a high-risk pregnancy, the odds are very good that you can save you and the baby. And if the baby has a disability — this is also used as a medical justification for abortion. “Oh, it’s medically necessary because the baby’s going to die” — well, if you have a view in health care that instead of “we kill a dying patient — expedite the death, get the baby to die before it naturally dies,” because the baby’s sick or the baby has a disability, that instead of taking a life, you allow the natural death to take place and you provide hospice care or palliative care for the child. Or many times, a child does survive. There’s so many cases where parents were told, “Your baby’s going to die,” and the baby survives. Or, “Your baby’s going to have a severe disability,” and the baby’s much better than they believed the baby to be.
The point here is there is a pro-life health care system that is within reach. It’s been done before. There are ——
Douthat: But that argument brings us back to questions of persuasion and mind-set, right?
Rose: Yeah, and ——
Douthat: You’re talking about a world where medical professionals themselves and the medical system writ large have just a very different basic and fundamental attitude. And also where, it is true, as you say, that diagnoses are wrong and children survive, and so on.
But it is also the case that that is a world that would accept, to a greater degree than our system does, disability.
Rose: Exactly.
Douthat: That is also part of the story here, right? And I don’t want to go too far with that. I just want to pull us back here at the end to the kind of arguments that you make.
I asked you to walk through, in almost a forensic debater’s way, the case around abortion. But the reality is that obviously, this is an incredibly personal issue that is connected to people’s experiences — their bodily experiences, their experience of having kids, not having kids, all of the rest of it. And it is, in the end, a female issue in a profound way that I think that no man can quite fully understand.
I gestured at this a little, talking about the Republican Party: It is the situation right now, where the Republican Party — which is the pro-life party — is a more male party, less female party. There is increasing political polarization of the sexes. And so the pro-life movement is in a position increasingly of speaking from within a more male coalition to a female population that, for Trump-specific reasons and other reasons, it’s alienated from that coalition.
So I just wanted to end by asking you: If you’re having a personal discussion about why women should be pro-life, what kinds of things do you say?
Rose: I think that we, as women — our superpower, the thing that makes us different from men, of course, is the ability to mother. And there has been so much, I think, rejection of motherhood as somehow giving us a lower status over the last few decades.
I know when I was growing up, the girlboss era was in full swing. It’s kind of dying down a little bit right now because people are realizing: Maybe that’s not my end game, girlbossing so hard.
And by the way, I girlboss, so I’m not saying girlbossing is bad.
Douthat: I wasn’t going to say it, but since you said it. Yes.
[Audience laughs.]
Rose: I love it. I mean, girlboss and use your talents to the fullest extent you can for the good of others — you hope that is the goal. But also embrace marriage and motherhood.
And yeah, there’s going to be seasons where you have to pull back. I travel far less than I did when I didn’t have my young children.
But I think that there needs to be, for women, a better vision for ourselves. And I would say this is true for men existentially, too, to some degree, in our culture. I think we’re very tired. We’re at war with each other, and we have been for some time — the sexes. And we’ve lost a sense of identity about what a woman even is.
You can make a joke about this, of course, with the transgender issue and confusion around biological womanhood, but what does it mean to be a woman? I would say the most unique thing about a woman versus a man is that ability, uniquely in its own womanly way, versus this masculine way, to bring life into the world. And that’s not always going to be biological because not every woman is called to biological motherhood, but I think a mature woman ultimately is going to be called to some sort of emotional or spiritual mothering of others. Same for a man — a fathering of others.
So I think presenting that vision where women are not at war with their ability to bring life into the world biologically, we’re not at war with men, we re-embrace marriage as a good thing, we are not at war with our talents that maybe exist outside of our marriage and our kids, that we could also use and develop — of course, that’s going to have different seasons of how we do that — I think that’s the more honest look at what women are designed for and what we can become. And I think we’re tired otherwise.
Douthat: And if your interlocutor says: That’s inspiring and I believe in that. But I, or a woman I know, is in a position where motherhood feels like it’s being imposed under impossible circumstances — which is, again, I think where a certain kind of pro-choice sentiment starts, where it just seems impossible — what do you say in that circumstance?
Rose: I get messages on Instagram almost daily about that. And with each case, we talk to her, we connect her to resources in her community that will help her and empower her, not just to give birth and have a healthy pregnancy, but if she chooses to mother.
And sometimes that’s the hard path for some women, of choosing to mother alone, because there’s a child support guy in the picture she doesn’t want to be with. And that is a challenging path. But there are so many heroes that I know of, women who have overcome the greatest challenges and have fought for their children and have accomplished incredible things.
So I would say there are resources. There are people that want to help you. So if you’re in that situation where you’re feeling: Oh, I need to have abortion — first of all, you’re not in a position of empowerment to say you feel like you need to have an abortion. Abortion was supposed to be choice, empowerment. The reality is people feel like: Oh, I really need this. I’m really hurting. I’m struggling — well, there are people that want to help you.
And I’m excited — at liveaction.org, there’s a resource page. We have a whole suite of organizations we work with. There are people that want to help you, and we’re not meant to do this alone. No woman is meant to do this alone, and people want to help you.
Douthat: And what do you get if you do it?
Rose: I mean, a lifetime of love. A new human being. There’s nothing greater than love and loving other human beings and being loved by them. And the joy of a new human life, even in challenging circumstances — again, talking about some of these people that I’ve had the privilege of learning their stories and playing a very small role in helping them — there’s no more peak life experience, I would say, this side of heaven than embracing a new human life and having the privilege of providing some nurture and helping them grow.
Douthat: Lila Rose, thank you for joining me.
Rose: Thank you. Thank you so much.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “Interesting Times” was produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Victoria Chamberlin and Emily Holzknecht. It was edited by Jordana Hochman. Mixing and engineering by Efim Shapiro and Pat McCusker. Cinematography by Marina King, Nathan Taylor and Valeria Verastegui. Video editing by Arpita Aneja, Julian Hackney and Steph Khoury. The supervising editor is Jan Kobal. The postproduction manager is Mike Puretz. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta, Emma Kehlbeck and Andrea Betanzos. The executive producer is Jordana Hochman. The director of Opinion Video is Jonah M. Kessel. The deputy director of Opinion Shows is Alison Bruzek. The director of Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. The head of Opinion is Kathleen Kingsbury.
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