Anti-Choice Abortion Warriors Have a New Poster Girl

She's a politically savvy history student at the University of California, Los Angeles who is appearing on countless conservative talk radio programmes and cable television news shows.

She was given the 2008 Person of the Year Malachi Award, by the longtime anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, and received a 50,000-dollar grant from an anti-abortion philanthropist.

On her campus, she is campaigning to urge the administration to cut ties with Planned Parenthood Federation of America, a national provider of sexual and reproductive health services.

Meet Lila Rose, 20, the president of Live Action Films, and the new face of the anti-abortion movement.

Rose's emergence onto the national stage comes at a time when President Barack Obama, who supports the legal right to abortion, is nevertheless seeking "common ground" on the issue.

Recent cabinet appointments, particularly the naming of the pro-choice former governor of Kansas, Kathleen Sebelius, to head up the Department of Health and Human Services, have infuriated movement activists. An invitation to the president to speak at the University of Notre Dame, a prestigious Catholic university, sparked an enormous controversy.

Now, anti-abortion activists are gearing up to battle Obama's first nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor.

The anti-abortion movement has been buoyed by a recent Gallup Poll that found that U.S. citizens appear to be shifting their views on abortion: 51 percent now call themselves "pro-life" and 42 percent "pro-choice." This is the first time since Gallup began polling on the issue in 1995 that a majority of U.S. adults are identifying themselves as pro-life. (Editors Note: This is a controversial interpretation of the Gallup Poll results. Regardless of whether they identify as pro-life or pro-choice only 23 percent of people think abortion should be illegal).

Rose's attack on Planned Parenthood has inspired anti-abortion activists all across the country. One fascinating aspect of her story is how quickly she has become connected to the broader Christian conservative movement, receiving legal and public relations support, education training, philanthropic grants, financial awards, and a tonne of publicity from longtime conservative media operations.

Since 2006, Rose has been going into Planned Parenthood clinics pretending to be a young teenager impregnated by an older man. She described her work by saying that she goes into these clinics in order "to illustrate the abuses and the lawlessness that goes on inside these clinics regularly." Rose tries to entice a Planned Parenthood staff or volunteer to violate the law by telling her to lie about the ages of their adult boyfriends.

A boiled down -- and dramatically enhanced -- version of her videos is posted on Rose's LiveAction.org website and You Tube. While surreptitious encounters at Planned Parenthood clinics in Indianapolis, Indiana, Memphis, Tennessee, Los Angeles, California, and Tucson, Arizona may never garner Susan Boyle-type numbers, nevertheless, they could have an effect on the operations and future government funding of Planned Parenthood.

"There is this stereotype of who we pro-life leaders are, and for the most part it would be white middle-aged religious men trying to impose their will on women," said the Rev. Patrick Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition. "So now with Lila, you bring this young, fresh college student that completely blows any stereotypes away. No one is going to accuse Lila of being mean, vindictive and harsh."

Rose's work "is an update of an old tactic invented by Mark Crutcher of the Denton, Texas-based group Life Dynamics, whose efforts were carried out by telephone and the conversations were primarily with receptionists," Frederick Clarkson, a longtime researcher into the anti-abortion movement, told IPS.