The Patriot Post® · The AP's Hit Piece on 'Baby Olivia'

It’s common knowledge that the Democrats want to run on the reversal of Roe v. Wade through the Dobbs decision. The Democrat Party platform demands allowing abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, like only six other nations — three of them communist — on earth.

However, pro-life advocates use logic, science, and truth, and the Left will do anything and everything to suppress information and use semantic games to obscure the facts.

Nothing has illustrated this more clearly than the AP’s recent hit piece on a video called “Baby Olivia” that several states have planned to show kids in sex ed classes. The three-minute video merely shows the scientifically accurate process of fetal development. It is not politically angled one way or another, though the group behind its making is a pro-life organization called Live Action. There were six physicians who oversaw the scientific accuracy of the video. Two are OBGYNs; the others specialize in anatomy, biology, neuroscience, and pediatric development. It has serious medical credentials. This is a fact that even the AP admitted.

One would think that in a sex ed class, showing the development of a baby in the womb is common sense. After all, one of the main purposes of sex is to reproduce.

However, the AP goes on to detail the criticisms of the short video. The two biggest arguments against the video are the use of the phrase “weeks after fertilization” and at what point a fetal heartbeat starts.

Live Action founder Lila Rose defended the use of the phrase “weeks after fertilization” as a more academic, chronologically accurate description of the child’s age in the womb than the generally used dating by the last menstrual cycle.

The AP says that when a fetal heartbeat begins is a hotly debated topic, but instead of going into detail, it simply states as fact, “At six weeks, the embryo isn’t yet a fetus and doesn’t have a heart.” This, however, is not true. As Live Action put it:

The human heart is the first organ to develop, according to multiple doctors — including Dr. Mobeen Syed and pediatric cardiologist Dr. Regina Lantin-Hermoso. Syed explained, “[The] heart is the very first organ that starts developing and it is the first organ that reaches a functional state. Can you imagine that the heart reaches a functional state even before its own development completes? When the heart is in the form of a tube, even then it is pulsating and it is beating and it is pumping blood.”

What the AP, its pro-abortion backers, and others who are trying to keep the “Baby Olivia” video out of sex ed classes are really afraid of is that kids will see clearly that the baby in the womb is a life from conception, that life is precious and worthy of protection, and that calling it a clump of cells is a ridiculous fallacy. They would much rather kids in sex ed classes learn about another scientifically inaccurate idea: that a boy can become a girl and a girl can become a boy.

This is not the first time that “Baby Olivia” has been the subject of attack by the Left. In 2021, when Big Tech was flexing its censorship muscles in earnest, Google banned the video advertisements along with other Live Action ads in an attempt to suppress pro-life information. It did, however, eventually reinstate “Baby Olivia” because it didn’t violate any of Google’s guidelines.

Iowa, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri are still debating bills that would require public school students to learn about fetal development in the womb as part of their curriculum, specifically for sex ed classes (which are typically middle and high school kids). North Dakota already has this law in the books, and “Baby Olivia” is part of the curriculum. These states choosing to show a crucial part of human development is not only educationally beneficial, but it could possibly save tiny lives further down the road — and that is a major plus.