Why are antiabortion activists going after sex education?
The fight for fetal personhood made headlines last month when the Alabama Supreme Court held that embryos counted as persons under the state’s wrongful death of a minor act. For a short time, the decision not only led many providers in the state to pause IVF services but also shone a spotlight on the antiabortion movement’s goal to bestow legal rights on fetuses more broadly. I’ve argued previously that the battle for fetal personhood is about much more than abortion. Indeed, antiabortion activists are opening up a surprising new front: the future of sex education. Several states are considering legislation that would require students to learn about fetal development using an animation called “Meet Baby Olivia” created by a prominent antiabortion group, Live Action, or else by showing a similar presentation covering the stages of fetal development.
Live Action developed “Olivia” as a tool to convince Americans that life begins at fertilization and to “defend [Olivia’s] constitutionally protected right to life.” The medical community has widely criticized the animation for misleading claims, like stating that the fetus named Olivia was “playing” at 11 weeks or that survival outside the womb was possible at 20 weeks.
To the extent these proposals are successful, sex education won’t be about sex. It will be about fetal development — and fetal rights.
Last year, Live Action presented the animation to multiple gatherings of state lawmakers, which appears to have resulted in an appetite among some for including it in school curricula. But rather than defining the film as part of a religion or life sciences curriculum, state lawmakers have proposed to reinvent their sex education classes. North Dakota became the first state in the nation to pass a bill requiring schools to either show films like “Olivia” or omit sex education programs altogether.
Administrative guidance issued to schools in North Dakota refers to the Live Action film by name. Similar bills have also been introduced in West Virginia, Iowa, Kentucky, and Missouri.
Social conservatives have turned sex education into a battlefield before. In the 1960s and 1970s, when progressive advocates first urged schools to adopt sex ed programs to reduce unplanned pregnancy and sexually transmitted infection, organizations like the Moral Majority — a leading group among the Christian right in the
1980s — opposed the move. Later, following the AIDS epidemic, many of these groups moderated their positions to embrace abstinence-only sex education, an approach that still shapes how reproductive and sexual health is taught in public schools in several states, including North Dakota.
Abortion opponents, on the other hand, have not historically tried to influence sex education programs directly. They have spread fetal images and publicized movies like “The Silent Scream,” a 1980s film that claimed to document an abortion in real time but framed abortion as an issue involving reproduction, not sex.
So why has the antiabortion movement suddenly grabbed onto sex education? The answer has everything to do with Roe v. Wade’s reversal, which created two separate problems for the antiabortion movement. First, it forced abortion opponents to identify a new rallying cry — something to unite a fragmented movement that has often embraced unpopular positions. Without a new goal, the antiabortion movement risked losing donors and seeing grassroots activists drift away to other conservative causes. Second, the Supreme Court decision unleashed a backlash that has made conservative lawmakers more gun-shy about public anger.
As far as a new goal was concerned, the answer for the antiabortion movement was easy: fetal personhood. The movement had organized in the 1960s to fight for fetal personhood, which is the idea that a fetus counts as a person under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution and that laws allowing abortions violate that person’s constitutional rights.
That’s where the “Baby Olivia” bills come in. Lawmakers can require schools either to abandon sex education programs or to show films like “Baby Olivia,” whose primary aim, according to Live Action’s founder Lila Rose, is to convince viewers of “the humanity of children in the womb” — and the unacceptability of “the barbaric procedures abortionists use to kill them.” Such bills can more easily fly under the radar — they aren’t new bans on abortion or in vitro fertilization — but they can still help groups like Live Action recruit new members and build a legal case for the idea that a fetus has constitutional rights.
We’ve seen wars over sex education before, but supporters of fetal personhood think they have found a way to win in more conservative states. For example, some school districts in North Dakota might choose to eliminate sex education curricula rather than show “Baby Olivia,” but many will simply show the film or one like it. And rather than learning much (or anything) about safe sex, a new generation of students will be invited to join the war for fetal rights.