This story about fetal development was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
Last August, Republican Rep. Gino Bulso looked out at a room filled with dozens of fellow state lawmakers as he touted new legislation he had just helped become a reality in Tennessee. Under the law, a fetal ultrasound or a video of a computer-animated fetus developing in the womb had become mandatory viewing for students in the state’s sex education classes.
Bulso was there at the request of the event’s host, anti-abortion advocacy nonprofit Live Action. The group had gathered legislators from across the country to provide them “with the policy information and persuasion strategies they need to end abortion,” according to its annual report.
Bulso’s panel, “The Agenda for Life in Schools and Beyond,” focused on how he had successfully shepherded his bill into becoming the second so-called fetal development education law in the country.
When lawmakers returned to their home states after the Live Action event, The Hechinger Report found, at least 10 of them sponsored bills similar to Bulso’s, in some cases proposing that students as young as third grade watch fetal development videos. Another legislator who introduced such a bill had sent his chief of staff and wife to the event. And the volume of legislation stemming from the gathering may be higher: Live Action keeps its list of attendees private, though many lawmakers posted about the event on social media or were featured in Live Action’s promotional materials.
Since 2023, when North Dakota became the first state to pass fetal development education legislation, anti-abortion lawmakers in more than 20 additional states have proposed such bills; 6 of those states, including Bulso’s, have passed them. As a result, this fall, nearly 4 million children will attend school in a state that requires them to watch a video or ultrasound of a fetus in the womb during sex education classes. And this year, legislators in four states tried to go even further: Their proposals would have required students to view depictions of abortions, including computer-animated videos.
After the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022, public schools have become an increasingly important battleground in the fight over abortion rights. Even though 12 states now ban abortion in all circumstances, the number of procedures has increased nationwide since the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe. Public support for abortion rights has also risen. Many anti-abortion advocates hope that getting their message in front of students can help them win the hearts and minds of young people and change these trends in the long run.
While critics, including medical professionals and some parents, say that the fetal development education materials being introduced to schools are manipulative and little more than propaganda, Live Action and other groups that produce them maintain they are medically accurate and unbiased. Experts in sex education and abortion policy say a related problem is the dearth of sex education in schools — students, on average, receive only about six hours during their high school years — that creates a vacuum for anti-abortion groups to move into.
“They’re attempting to reach children at an age where I would assume most haven’t been exposed to issues of an abortion,” says Alisa Von Hagel, a political science professor at University of Wisconsin-Superior who has studied the strategies of the anti-abortion movement. “They’re attempting to be the first to imprint this quote, unquote ‘knowledge’ or opinion about these issues.”
During a debate earlier this year in the Arkansas Senate, Republican Sen. Alan Clark referred to his state’s proposal as “one of the most important pro-life bills that’s ever come before us.” He also said, “It will shape the minds of kids from now on.”
The proposal would have required showing a video created by Live Action to students starting in sixth grade. In the video, titled Meet Baby Olivia, a narrator tells the viewer that life begins at conception and says the fetus, named Baby Olivia, begins playing and exploring as early as 11 weeks.
In an annual report, Live Action noted that its Meet Baby Olivia video caused a “37-point shift towards the pro-life perspective among viewers.” The organization also highlighted the impact its materials can have on kids, in particular, to help “instill a reverence for life as children at impressionable ages develop their world view.”
Both Bulso and Noah Brandt, Live Action’s vice president of communications, have said the only goals of Baby Olivia and fetal development education are to teach and inform students — but they also expected it to leave an impression. “It is intuitive that, after watching that, people would be less likely to support abortion on demand,” Brandt said.
Live Action’s work to connect with students is also part of playbooks for other anti-abortion organizations. Take Heartbeat International, for example, a group that supports clinics known as “crisis pregnancy centers,” which provide limited medical care and encourage people not to have abortions. Heartbeat also offers in-person and online training, including one program on how to “Change the Nation with Pro-life Education,” featuring specific tactics for working with public schools. One speaker at Heartbeat’s 2023 national conference described performing an ultrasound on a pregnant woman in front of public school students to “plant a seed of life.”
Before creating Meet Baby Olivia, Live Action was best known for anti-abortion campaigns and undercover stings against Planned Parenthood, and largely worked outside of policymaking. But as the organization has grown in recent years, it has begun to coordinate directly with legislators.
Live Action held its inaugural lawmaker summit in 2022, two months after Roe was overturned. The following spring, North Dakota passed a fetal development education law, the nation’s first.
By 2024, the summit had doubled in size to host 70 lawmakers at a four-star hotel in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Lawmakers attended panel discussions titled “Saving Our Children and Helping Their Mothers” and “Communications and Persuasion: Winning the Messaging War.” Live Action also screened its abortion videos, including Meet Baby Olivia.
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.”
Sellers said further that he hoped education could help people “make a better decision of, ‘Should I get an abortion or not?’”
Several people who opposed Sellers’ bills agreed that the videos contained some factual information and that topics such as fetal development and abortion could be useful to learn about in schools, but it was the presentation of the information — and that it came from an anti-abortion group — that worried them, they explained.
“My biggest concern is that it’s set up to come from a moralistic and fear-based place as opposed to a medical or wellness model,” said Stephanie Vazzano, a therapist who lives in New Hampshire who submitted written testimony opposing the abortion video bill. “They do have some facts. When you watch them you can be really seduced by those facts … but then these other things get slipped in.”
During the hearing for his bills, Sellers repeatedly said he was open to other abortion videos being shown but didn’t know of any. This lack of alternatives has allowed Live Action to succeed in getting into schools so far, says Mary Ziegler, a law professor at University of California-Davis and author of several books on the history of abortion debates. “Part of what they’ve exposed is that there are gaps in the way we’ve done sex education,” she points out. “There’s truth in the sense that sex education programs across the board, including those favored by progressives, don’t have enough information about pregnancy, childbirth, abortion or fetal development.”
In many ways, Live Action’s efforts — as well as those of Heartbeat International and other organizations working to reach K-12 students — are a response to groups that run comprehensive sex education programs. Five states require comprehensive sex education, and individual districts in other states also provide it. These programs typically cover an array of topics including contraception, gender identity, consent, and options if one becomes pregnant. Planned Parenthood offers such a program to schools and has become the single-largest provider of sex ed nationwide.
“I’m sympathetic if someone says we wouldn’t want any organization that has any point of view creating any materials for our public school system,” Brandt of Live Action said. “But I would just say that’s not the reality that’s happening across the country. It’s tough to find curriculum that is from a group that no one would oppose.”
Even some anti-abortion Republicans have drawn a line at directly promoting the use of Live Action materials in public schools. Among them is Arkansas Sen. Breanne Davis, who led the opposition to a bill that specifically called for Meet Baby Olivia to be shown in schools. She raised concerns about requiring content from “a political advocacy group.” Davis said in an interview, “That’s just out of bounds for what we should be putting into law.”
In hearings, Arkansas representative and bill sponsor Mary Bentley argued it would be easier and better for school districts to be told which video to use rather than have to make that determination themselves. She remains staunchly in support of Meet Baby Olivia: “I think it’s so good to help kids understand the process of fetal development,” she said. “I just assumed that it would get the support that we needed in the most pro-life state in the nation.”
Davis proposed her own bill, one that would require the Arkansas department of education to adopt standards for age-appropriate fetal development education, including showing an ultrasound, in the future. No video would be required, but districts could still show one, such as Meet Baby Olivia, if they chose to.
In the end, Bentley’s bill died and Davis’s legislation was signed into law in April.
For Brandt, of Live Action, the law falls short of what he considers the “gold standard” of fetal development education, but “We’re happy that they passed some version of it,” he said. “That is definitely better than nothing, and maybe can even be improved upon in the future.”
