The Perils of Lila Rose
For an interesting look at one of the front-line warriors in the abortion wars, be sure to stop by the L.A. Times for their profile of culture warrior, Lila Rose. (For disclosure’s sake, I’ve had the chance to sit in on a number of interviews between the subject in question and Ed Morrissey during his daily talk show.) While you can find out much more from the linked article and her own web site, the short version runs thusly: Ms. Rose is an anti-abortion crusader who looks much younger than her actual age. She goes with a friend and a hidden camera to Planned Parenthood clinics, pretending to be a 13 or 14 year old girl who is pregnant by an adult male in his 30s, seeking to get the clinic workers on film breaking laws or otherwise steering young girls astray.
After reading quite a bit on the subject and hearing her speak at length on her exploits, I’ve been able to draw some conclusions, but they’re not as cut and dried in either direction as you may think. On the one hand, if these activities are highlighting specific instances of criminal behavior and outrageous offenses, they should be a signal to law enforcement officials to get on the stick and investigate the specific individuals involved. If a clinic employee is telling underage girls to cross state lines with their adult “boyfriends” to get an abortion in direct violation of state law, that needs to be stopped no matter what you may think about the statute in question. The law is the law.
Beyond that, if workers are failing to report to authorities when they discover cases of pedophiles and rapists, the need for attention by the authorities is even more urgent. Yes, I am well aware of the gray lines involved here which we usually seek to address through “Romeo and Juliet” laws. I’m not saying that the police need to be chasing down 17 year old boys when their 16 year old girlfriend winds up “in a family way” unexpectedly. But when a 13 year old girl has been impregnated by a man in his thirties, there is no gray line. The guy belongs in jail if not at the business end of a noose, and the cops need to be on the job instantly.
Before we begin lionizing Ms. Rose too much, however, we should keep in mind that there are most definitely two sides to this story. Don’t be confused for a moment into thinking that there is any sort of noble search for truth going on here if the results don’t deliver political pay dirt for one clearly identified side of the ideological wars. Lila isn’t seeking to identify and prosecute individual bad actors at women’s health clinics. With the failure by social conservatives to criminalize abortion across the nation, she is looking to undermine abortion – and Planned Parenthood as one of its most visible practioners – using whatever guerilla tactics are required.
Her films are posted in short hits to YouTube after having definitely been edited to portray the clinics in the absolute worst light possible. She claims that full length versions are available on her web site. (They are, but only if you want to install a totally different video player and sit through some very hinkey loading issues.) Even then, the videos have some very choppy jump cuts that make it look like other things have been left out. The L.A. Times article sites just one instance where footage of clinic workers protesting that they weren’t allowed to break the law in that way seems to have found its way to the cutting room floor before the YouTube debut.
Also, I have to wonder where the videos are of the other clinics they visited but which failed to produce any Made-For-Fox footage? During one interview, Lila claimed that there were none, but that requires us to believe that such horror shows are going on in the check-in areas of every single women’s health clinic in the country. Color me dubious.
In some of these instances I can also feel some empathy for the workers at the PP clinics. If a young woman facing this sort of trouble shows up and the first thing she hears is, “That’s not allowed in this state, young lady. Get in the car. We’re taking you to your parents right this minute.” well… you might not get much word-of-mouth business. Likewise, if the very first reaction is for the worker to call the police and demand the girl assist in the arrest of her boyfriend, girls aren’t going to be seeking help there.
None of this excuses the failure to report pedophiles and child rapists, but the clinic employees doubtless have the care and support of the girls in mind first and other associated crimes, laws, etc. second. I don’t envy them that situation of having to deal with and find ways to help young girls in such positions.
At any rate, I leave it to you to be the judge. Are Ms. Rose’s activities legitimate and helpful to our society? Are they immediately sullied by the fact that she is, indeed, lying and perpetrating a fraud each time she enters a clinic on one of these undercover missions? Is there an endemic problem with Planned Parenthood and a failure to respect duly passed laws? Let us know.
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28 Responses to “The Perils of Lila Rose”
Sorry, but her credibility , after re-editing & excluding footage not directly focused on her narrow view/goal to “undermine abortion”, is left severely wanting. I feel that for the most part, the PP staff has the best interests of their patients in mind. It sounds like Ms. Rose has the best interests of her agenda in mind.
At what point would what you feel about the motivations of PP staff be open to questioning though, christoofar? Is there anything that anyone could show you that wouldn't be dismissed as the product of overzealous activism? There are statements within those videos that are wrong no matter what the edited portions of the tapes had on them.
I've never understood the ease with which prochoicers accept Planned Parenthood's ethical standing without question. At best you could say that these instances are the result of poor training of their staff, and that the people involved are loose cannons rather than representative of the organization's hierarchy. I too would like to know if Rose is honest in saying that she didn't visit hundreds of clinics and cherry pick the egregious examples, but I find it just as wrong to assume she's lying as to presume that this was a repeated offense at all of the clinics she visited.
Yah, you would never see a Left-oriented documentarian edit his or her works to fit a pre-conceived result, if that even is really a fair comparison in this case.
Seems like the using their own tactics against them doesn't go over very well.
The main question would seem to be: Is there any other viable way to get this information other than, essentially, entrapment? My guess is that anonymous interviews with girls who actually need/want/want to know about the services of Planned Parenthood would get at the exact same material, but maybe I'm wrong.
credibility , after re-editing & excluding footage not directly focused on her narrow view/goal..is left severely wanting
Sounds just like the material of most of the TMV contributors………very few here attempt to bring all aspects/facts to the discussion. Ms. Rose's agenda-advancing is nothing worse than done here.
pacatrue:
Thank you for your comments, as this was more to my point. If simple information seeking was Ms. Rose's goal, she could very easily do it with out all the seekrit espionage.
cs – I think PP as an organization, stands true to it's goal – helping women with their health issues. As far as individual workers, there will be very good ones, and there will be bad ones, this is the case in any business organization. If someone is breaking the law, then they should be investigated by law enforcement & treated accordingly.
AR – Your last sentence is puzzling to me, please explain.
So, what, you guys would be fine with Lila Rose stopping girls as they enter and exit the clinics and trying to get them to submit to an interview? You mean to tell me that no one would see that as harassment, or an invasion of privacy (since the girls are young and perhaps would have difficulty feeling that they could refuse to be interviewed?)
I agree with chris on this — and I thank Jazz for writing about Lila Rose. Stories like this often slip through the cracks because they're not breaking news.
I don't think Ms. Rose is as interested in helping 14-year-olds who are impregnated by 31-year-old boyfriends as she is in making it difficult or impossible for Planned Parenthood to provide family planning and reproductive health services — which as we all know includes a lot more than just abortion.
In general, I think entrapment is a very poor way to stop abuses of almost any kind. I have never liked the idea of pushing people into committing the very illegal or unethical acts you're trying to stop. And Ms. Rose's “undercover” work tells us very little about how an interview with a real 14-year-old victim of statutory rape by a much older man would have gone, since in a real interview the pregnant girl would have been responding in accordance with the actual facts of her situation instead of in service to the goal of saying whatever needed to be said to lead the intake worker into saying what Rose was trying to get her to say.
If there really were widespread abuses of ethics or violations of law at Planned Parenthood clinics, why would it be necessary for Rose to lie and deceive in order to expose such abuses or violations? Why would she need to edit her video footage to make it come out the way she wants it to? Why would she refuse to provide PP officials with the unedited tape? Why would she make it as difficult as possible for people to see the unedited tape?
My feeling is that if PP clinics really were violating the law or doing anything unethical in any significant way, and if Rose and O'Keefe really were at all concerned with the physical and emotional health concerns of very young pregnant teens, they would not need to do this.
If there really were widespread abuses of ethics or violations of law at Planned Parenthood clinics, why would it be necessary for Rose to lie and deceive in order to expose such abuses or violations?
Um, because other than Lila Rose, no one is looking for evidence of violations? How else could this possibly come to light? A guy who molested his stepdaughter is going to come forward and confess and complain that the abortion providers didn't report the crime?
My feeling is that if PP clinics really were violating the law or doing anything unethical in any significant way,
Again with the feelings. {rolls eyes}
You know, my feeling was that if the Bush administration had been violating the law or doing anything unethical in any significant way, then we would have known about it. How'd that feeling turn out?
It's sad she is not using her time and money to help the babies that are already born.
Patrolling for violators of state law should be law enforcements job.
Does she think that all women and young girls have abortions just for the heck of it? Honestly there are two sides to every story and I don't hear the women's reason for having an abortion to loud and clear.
And if they are not doing their job? How do you know or get any kind of say in where her money goes? What is wrong with you people. I'm pretty neutral on this issue of abortion and think criminalization would be a horrible idea. Does this woman have an agenda, of course. SO WHAT! Ignoring molestation and or rape trumps any agenda this woman has. “I don't trust her so I'll ignore what I heard”. Also it's not entrapment by any legal definition. Cops send underage kids to buy booze and cigs and thats not entrapment so how could this be. Begging, pleading, telling the provider a sob story would be but just saying “Hey I'm 14 and my 30 yo boyfriend knocked me up can I get an abortion?” is not entrapment.
The point is that there are very likely ways to discover much of this information without private citizens faking their age and lying to an organization, hoping to get something illegal to happen, and then doctoring the videos to make the group look as bad as possible. Clearly that's not the ideal form of law enforcement. Now, if there are no other possible ways to learn the legitimate stuff (as other commentors have guessed) then her tactics take on more legitimacy. Or to put it another way, yes, if law enforcement is deliberately not doing their job, cannot be coaxed into it, is negligent or incompetent, then this is perhaps better than nothing. But do we know that is in fact the situation?
“I've never understood the ease with which prochoicers accept Planned Parenthood's ethical standing without question.”
Here's a possibility: a lot of us prochoicers have had to use their services at some time or another, and didn't have anywhere else to go. To most people, including scared teenagers, being treated like a human being who needs full information goes a long way.
“Um, because other than Lila Rose, no one is looking for evidence of violations?”
Um…yeah. Nobody else besides this one person is looking for PP to do anything wrong. My turn to roll my eyes.
So, what, you guys would be fine with Lila Rose stopping girls as they enter and exit the clinics and trying to get them to submit to an interview?
I would not.
You know, my feeling was that if the Bush administration had been violating the law or doing anything unethical in any significant way, then we would have known about it.
We did know about it. We've known about it since at least the start of Bush's second term. Or should I say, a lot of us knew it. Others ignored all the evidence and facts about Bush violations of the law and unethical behavior, accused anyone who refused to be a know-nothing of being anti-American and having Bush Derangement Syndrome, and absolutely, vehemently, doggedly, refused to believe what was right in front of their eyes.
I don't want to get personal and name names. I'll just roll my eyes in the appropriate direction.
Um, because other than Lila Rose, no one is looking for evidence of violations? How else could this possibly come to light?
Lila Rose is not looking for evidence of violations. She is looking for ways to shut down clinics that provide abortions because she wants abortions to be illegal but there is no chance that will happen because most Americans want abortion to stay legal. It's not the alleged violations she cares about; it's discrediting the clinics and clinic staff themselves, causing them legal hassles, convincing consumers not to use them. But again, not because of violations, because if it could be proved that family planning clinics are 100 percent violation-free, Lila Rose would still want them shut down.
The whole idea of “looking for violations” in the absence of any evidence that there ARE violations (i.e., systemic and widespread violations, because NO area of human life is entirely free of lawbreakers or unethical players).
Well, gee, could it be because I worked there? Could it be because I saw the staff work day to day while I ran the computers and helped the CFO work on the budget? A budget whose main goal was to provide services to people who couldn't otherwise afford contraceptives, pap smears and other forms of care was something that we spent a lot of time on. Maybe it was the bomb threats that turned me against the religious conservatives. Or the time they sabotaged the building's AC system. Could it be the clinic that didn't ever do a single abortion that was fire-bombed? Could the protesting “minister” who stood outside and just “cried” over the woman he'd seen come in with a large belly from her unborn baby (His words, not mine.) going into Planned Parenthood for an abortion when the truth was that PP in Kansas City didn't do abortions after 12 weeks gestation that made me doubt his honesty and that of his followers. Maybe it was cleaning up the glass from the windows that were shot out over the weekend that made me think that the conservative “pro-lifers” just aren't that rational or considerate of the truth or any people who don't follow their beliefs. All of that happened in only two years of working there. Sorry, CS, but I know who the honest people were and they weren't the people on your side of the debate.
Jim, thank you for doing that work. To me, you are a hero.
roro- Apparently you, or people you know, have anecdotal experience but I have my own which leads me to the opposite conclusion about how sincerely the organization takes its mission of providing balanced information.
Kathy, I made the analogy to Bush secretive policies precisely because I'm admitting that I wrongly dismissed information that was coming out because I did not trust the sources of that information. Just as you and several other people are in this instance dismissing these instances of lawless behavior because you trust the PP workers more than you trust the person who uncovered the information.
Jim S- dishonest people on the other side of the debate doesn't prove innocence on the side of all PP staff- even if the ones that you worked with were honest. There are bad players on both sides (often motivated by good intentions which get twisted.) But some of us see that, while others see only saints on one side and malicious hypocrites on the other.
CStandley — Nobody's saying that there aren't a few bad seeds within the PP organization; every organization has them. It's just that when you multiply “anecdotal information” by millions of appointments over the last however many decades, you get a certain picture of an organization. If you think that giving birth control and free STD screenings and abortions to the women who need them is evil, unchristian, and morally corrupt, then that's the picture you get. If you don't, then you get the picture of an organization that is providing an invaluable service that is hard to come by elsewhere.
Fine, roro, but if your picture of an organization providing an invaluable service leads you to protect that organization from what may be valid information regarding abuses that skirt the law and endanger young girls, then I'm going to call you out on it. You can't allow your overall favorable view of the organization to exempt it from legitimate criticism, and as I've tried to point out here, the privacy issues tend to act as a shield for potential wrongdoing of the people within the organization as well. Do you see that point, and if so, in what way could the organization be properly assessed for potential instances of misconduct?
I made the analogy to Bush secretive policies precisely because I'm admitting that I wrongly dismissed information that was coming out because I did not trust the sources of that information. Just as you and several other people are in this instance dismissing these instances of lawless behavior because you trust the PP workers more than you trust the person who uncovered the information.
The disclosure of the Bush administration's clandestine, illegal, and unethical policies are completely different in kind from Lila Rose's “dislosure” of violations in PP clinics — meaning, the nature of the disclosures themselves, not just the violations being disclosed. When you're talking about things like the NSA secret spy program, the lies and misinformation used to justify the war in Iraq (i.e., WMDs, connection between Iraq and al Qaeda, etc.), the use of arbitrary indefinite detention w/o charges or trial, the denial of habeus corpus, the massive expansion of executive power, etc., etc., etc., these abuses, crimes, and bad acts came to public notice via many different routes and sources. It wasn't one individual person with an ideological opposition to one medical procedure (i.e., abortion) going into one kind of medical facility (local community clinics designed for girls and women who cannot afford private physicians' services) with a hidden camera to entrap workers into breaking, or appearing to break, the law so that the clinics in which these workers are employed would have to shut down and no longer be able to provide ob-gyn care to women with no other resources.
It's this statement that is bizarre. There is no reason to look for violations because there's no evidence of violations. Uh, OK. So in your world, how do we know if there's evidence, if we agree ahead of time that we shouldn't be looking for it?
Well, gee, I don't know. How do we know if there's evidence that coal mines or factories or giant discount retailers are ignoring safety regulations or exploiting their employees? Are there inspectors and government auditors whose job it is to ensure compliance with codes, regulations, and local laws?
How do we know if real estate developers are building homes and subdivisions and apartment buildings to code? How does a potential home-buyer avoid buying a home infested with carpenter ants or termites? Do we have no alternative but to allow zealous college students to go in with hidden cameras and try to trap developers and sellers to reveal that they are lying? Do we assume they are lying and breaking the law and, armed with that assumption, go in and do everything we can to try to prove that they are?
Kathy, if you know of some sort of oversight of these clinics which actually involves someone who's not part of the PP staff being privvy to the conversations that take place to assess what happens behind closed doors, then please inform me.
By using a sting operation, no one's privacy was invaded but we see how certain staff members behave when no one is looking. So far no one has explained to me how you think the same outcome could be obtained without violating patient privacy.
If what she alleges is true, that every time she has done this she's gotten these kinds of responses, that is something you should be concerned about rather than defending simply because you don't trust the messenger.
Jim,
Your outrage at people who bomb PPs is completely justified, but you're making a false comparison here. Lila Rose is not firebombing PP clinics or smashing windows. She is exposing blatant violations of the law that endanger innocent children and protect child sexual abusers. Why are you so eager to stop people like Rose? This isn't some kind of game — these staffers have been found in multiple cases operating on the side of the abusers, and that has to be exposed before it can be realized and stopped.
At you other people who are so quick to laud PP: go look up PPs founder, Margaret Sanger — one of the first major proponents of eugenics in America and an out-and-out racist. And this isn't just the viewpoint of the PPs founder. If you want a glimpse of PP today, just watch this: http://liveaction.org/projects/racism/ If it doesn't shock you completely, it should.