On his panel, Bulso walked through every step of creating Tennessee’s law, from filing the bill to committee deliberations to its eventual passage. He gave Live Action credit for providing him with resources to help make the case that Meet Baby Olivia was scientifically accurate.
Most of the proposed fetal development education bills don’t prescribe a specific video, but many suggest Meet Baby Olivia. Two bills in do Texas mention alternatives: A 1983 film by PBS’s NOVA called The Miracle of Life and a video produced by the St. John Paul II Life Center, a crisis pregnancy center.
Said Brandt, it’s up to “lawmakers, school board members, teachers, that kind of thing, to try to make prudential judgments about, ‘Is the actual resource I’m using a good resource to accomplish the goal that I’ve been tasked to accomplish?’”
Meet Baby Olivia, in particular, has been sharply criticized by medical experts since Live Action released the video in 2021. Many doctors have raised concerns about its language and portrayal of the timeline of fetal development. Parents and students in Fargo, North Dakota, used arguments such as these to convince the school district to use a different video to meet the state law.
“The Baby Olivia video is designed to manipulate students’ emotions rather than to share objective facts about embryonic and fetal development,” Nisha Verma, senior advisor of reproductive health policy and advocacy for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in a statement. “The video attempts to advance anti-abortion policies such as fetal personhood and uses non-scientific language about conception, pregnancy, embryos, and fetuses to evoke an emotional response.”
Live Action maintains the video is medically accurate — and has its own roster of anti-abortion doctors who endorse it, including a handful who collaborated with the organization on the video’s creation.
The approval of some medical professionals was part of the appeal of Meet Baby Olivia and another Live Action video series called What Is Abortion? for New Hampshire Rep. John Sellers, another Republican who attended the group’s lawmaker summit. The series shows a computer rendering of three different points in the pregnancy process.
In January, Sellers filed two bills to make Live Action’s videos required viewing for New Hampshire students — including college students in the case of Meet Baby Olivia. Both bills, however, faced opposition: Nearly 700 residents officially recorded their objection with the state or submitted testimony opposing the fetal development bill, and 1,080 registered their opposition to the abortion video legislation. By comparison, the number of residents who registered in favor was 23 and 30, respectively.
Many of those who submitted written testimony called the bill an attempt to indoctrinate students; Sellers maintained the legislation was nonpolitical. “We’re just trying to get the information out to the kids so they’re educated,” he said in an interview. “I don’t know how you indoctrinate somebody with the truth of the development of life … or the truth that these are the types of procedures of abortions. I can’t see that being indoctrination.”
