(LifeSiteNews) — Pro-life activist Lila Rose won a debate on abortion at Yale University on Tuesday to the reported “shock” of the organizer.
Rose, the founder and president of Live Action, gave a compelling and moving defense of the unborn’s right to life during a debate against Frances Kissling, former abortion clinic director and president of Catholics for Choice.
Shortly after the debate, Rose announced on Twitter, “We won. The room voted for the pro-life side. Yale organizer was shocked.”
Debate just ended.
We won. The room voted for the pro-life side.
Yale organizer was shocked.
Change is here.
Thank you for praying 🙏 pic.twitter.com/fLWtBO80e6
— Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) September 17, 2025
The pro-life champion first called out the euphemisms used by pro-abortion advocates, including Kissling. She recalled a young mother’s disposal of her dead baby boy, who she stuffed in a towel and trash bag, throwing him away “like trash, as if he had no worth at all.”
“Whether he died at birth or just after, he was not just a pregnancy, not just a fetus — he was a son,” Rose said. She pointed out that some referred to the death of this boy, who died at birth or soon after, as a “pregnancy loss,” and some “insisted that he not be referred to as a baby.”
“Why? To name him is to admit his shared humanity,” she continued. “A child was hidden in a closet and his humanity was denied.”
She went on to stress the gruesome reality of abortion, which is brutal at every stage of gestation.
“Abortion procedures tear babies limb from limb in suction abortions,” Rose pointed out. The abortion pill abortion “starves a child to death with drugs.” And later-term abortions “pierc(e) a needle into the beating heart or brain of a living, developing child.”
The crux of her argument was that it is “wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being,” no matter the age, size, and stage of development. A six-week-old baby is “just as valuable” as a two-year-old toddler.
Drawing a line at any other point than conception to determine when a human being deserves protection is “arbitrary” and “innately dehumanizing,” Rose noted. “Killing preborn children must be illegal for the same reasons that killing born children, a newborn, must be illegal.”
The living humanity of the unborn, which is denied by some pro-aborts, is not debatable, since “Science affirms that human life begins at fertilization,” said Rose, who added that this is admitted by biology textbooks and even by Peter Singer, a former Princeton professor, who is pro-infanticide.
She went on to address pro-aborts who acknowledge that the unborn are human beings but simply believe it is “sometimes okay to kill innocent human beings.”
Rose invoked the 14th amendment, which declares “no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty or property, nor deny any person equal protection of the laws.”
She emphasized this was meant for every human being, something stressed by Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan, one of the authors of this amendment, who said “its purpose was to protect even ‘the lowest and most despised of the human race.’”
The historical dehumanization of certain kinds of people throws the evil of abortion into relief, and so Rose hearkened back to America’s period of slavery for blacks, and the Nazis’ dehumanization of Jews and the disabled.
“The Nazis called the Jews subhuman,” Rose noted. “African Americans were treated as property, not people. The Supreme Court of our country, in Dred Scott v. Sandford of 1857, said that black men and women were “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
“That judicial lie about their humanity paved the way for brutal oppression,” Rose said.
“The pattern has always been the same: strip away the personhood, redefine human beings as something that is less than, and then commit atrocities in the name of someone else’s progress,” she continued.
After Rose’s speech, her opponent, Kissling, appeared to concede that the unborn have some value but maintained that the concerns of the mother can outweigh the unborn’s child right to protection from violence and death.
Rose asked Kissling at what point she believes the child should have the right to life, and while she seemed to shift on this point during their discussion, she eventually suggested birth determines the baby’s right to life.
This is because when the baby is no longer in the woman’s body, the woman “has no need for those protections,” said Kissling, as if the ability to kill one’s unborn child is a “protection” for the mother.
The abortion supporter went on to praise the idea of the “greatest good for the greatest number of people,” a principle that ignores the rights of the individual and has been used to justify a number of grave evils.
Rose argued not only that the unborn fundamentally deserve protection but that the welfare of the mother is not in opposition to that of the child.
“Choose love, not violence,” she concluded.
