Exposed: Racism, Statutory Rape cover-up by Planned Parenthood

Lila Rose, UCLA undergraduate, has been awarded a $50,000 "Life Prize" for exposing cover up.

SAN FRANCISCO, Ca. (California Catholic Daily) - Lila Rose, the feisty pro-life UCLA undergraduate who has been a constant thorn in the side of Planned Parenthood, has been awarded a $50,000 "Life Prize" by the Gerard Health Foundation of Natick, Massachusetts.

Rose was among six of the first ever "Life Prize" recipients announced by the foundation last month. The foundation said in a statement that the awards go to "individuals or groups that have made unsurpassed strides in preserving and upholding the sanctity of human life. These winners have demonstrated their leadership and progress in pro-life achievements through public advocacy, scientific research, legal action, outreach and public discourse activities."

The foundation's statement described Lila Rose this way: "Founder of student pro-life organization Live Action and President of its UCLA chapter. She has launched several successful, undercover investigations that exposed the racism and statutory rape cover-up by Planned Parenthood."

California Catholic Daily first wrote about Lila Rose in January 2007 when the then 18-year-old sophomore published an exposé on how UCLA health counselors pressure students to get abortions. The story appeared in the inaugural edition of The Advocate, a quarterly pro-life magazine that debuted on the UCLA campus on Jan. 22, 2007. "I have always been very concerned about how women in our society are pressured to have abortions," Rose told California Catholic at the time, which is why she said she launched her investigation.

After hearing second-hand accounts from other women at UCLA about how they were encouraged to have abortions at the student health center, Rose said she decided to go undercover as a co-ed who had inadvertently gotten pregnant to see what advice campus health counselors would provide.

In May 2007, The Advocate published another Lila Rose exposé after she posed as a 15 year old, went to a Santa Monica Planned Parenthood clinic and announced that a 23-year-old man had impregnated her. According to The Advocate, Planned Parenthood staff informed Rose that this constituted statutory rape -- and then encouraged her to "figure out a birth-date that works" in order to obtain the abortion and avoid getting the man in trouble with the police. Planned Parenthood staff assured Rose that if she said she was 16 or older, they wouldn't have to report the rape.

"California's mandatory reporting laws for statutory rape are supposed to protect pregnant minors," said Rose at the time. "Underage girls are being targeted by predators, and Planned Parenthood is busy covering up the evidence. How many other rapes has this one clinic covered up?"

In February 2008, Rose announced the results of yet another undercover investigation of Planned Parenthood. Rose hired an actor to pose as a prospective donor and had him call Planned Parenthood affiliates in five states, offering to give money to "lower the number of blacks in America" and other racially motivated reasons. Not one Planned Parenthood employee rejected the money, nor did any of them object to the racist rhetoric of the caller.

When Rose was 15, she founded Live Action in her hometown of San Jose, a youth group that today has chapters at UCLA and Claremont McKenna College. During her freshman year at UCLA, she began The Advocate, which has been integrated with Live Action Films. Life Action Films posts short videos of Rose's investigations on sites like YouTube to give them broader distribution.

When Rose posted hidden-camera interviews to YouTube showing how Planned Parenthood employees encouraged her to hide statutory rape, Planned Parenthood of Los Angeles threatened to sue her. "I received an e-mail in my personal e-mail box on Sunday from the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood in Los Angeles," Rose told California Catholic Daily at the time. The May 14 letter from Mary-Jane Wagle said Rose's videos violate the California Invasion of Privacy Act because they were "apparently obtained through false pretenses and unlawfully" since the conversations "were surreptitiously recorded without the knowledge and consent of the PPLA employees."

In early September, YouTube blocked four videos from Live Action over a two-week period, claiming the videos contained "inappropriate content." Among the blocked videos were telephone recordings of Planned Parenthood employees agreeing to process donations from the caller with the overtly racist agenda.

Despite the threats and harassment, Rose continues both The Advocate and Live Action Films. Now 20, she is a junior majoring in history.

In addition to Lila Rose, other recipients include: the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists; Richard Doerflinger, associate director of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities; Margaret "Peggy" Hartshorn, president of Heartbeat International, a network of more than 1,000 pregnancy resource centers; Jill Stanek, the nurse who first publicly exposed infanticide of abortion survivors and proponent of the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act; and Kay Coles James, founder and president of the Gloucester Institute, an outreach and education initiative for young African-Americans that recognizes "that the first civil right is life itself."

The awards will be given at a ceremony in Washington, DC, on Jan. 23, 2009.

Light Your Free Candle for Pope Francis. May He Rest in Peace.

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This article first appeared in California Catholic Daily and is used with Permission

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This article originally appeared in California Catholic Daily and is reprinted with permission.