A Debate That Mattered: Lila Rose vs. Frances Kissling at Yale

Abortion Museum
Sep 22
11 min read

In an event hosted by the Yale Political Union, the nation’s oldest and largest society for collegiate debate, Lila Rose, founder and president of Live Action, faced off against Frances Kissling, former president of Catholics for Choice and a leading pro-abortion voice. The debate asked one of the most urgent questions of our time: Do preborn children deserve equal human rights?

By the end of the evening, the verdict was clear. The audience voted 60–31 in favor of Rose’s pro-life position, a decisive outcome on a campus often assumed to lean strongly pro-choice.

The Debate - Opening Statements

Frances Kissling’s Opening Statement

Frances Kissling, who proclaims to be a Catholic, opened the debate by framing abortion not as a simple matter of “choice,” but as a “conflict of values.” She argued that a woman’s life has inherent value, and that this value becomes especially important when she becomes pregnant, particularly in cases where the pregnancy was unintended. From her perspective, it is ultimately up to the woman to decide whether or not to continue a pregnancy.

To reinforce her claim of being Catholic while holding pro-abortion views, Kissling asserted that Catholic teaching is always changing. As an example, she pointed to the Church’s past teaching on limbo, suggesting that shifts in doctrine demonstrate space for differing views within the faith.

She went further, proclaiming that “abortion is not just a right, abortion is an important reproductive act.” In her framing, abortion was elevated from being a legal allowance to being a vital component of reproductive health and freedom. She described abortion as a “decision on how many children you can care for and love,” presenting it as part of responsible parenthood.

At one point (around the 20:00 mark), Kissling turned to criticize conservatives for celebrating family life and larger households. In what came across as a mocking rant, she caricatured pro-life joy at growing families:

“What is happening is there are too few people. This is going to be wonderful! Women are going to have more babies! Yes, there is going to be bigger and great families.”

She dismissed this perspective as reducing women’s choices to whether they would “have babies for us or not have babies for us.”

Kissling concluded her prepared remarks by claiming that “we are going back to complicated ethical questions, that do not have a single answer.” With this, she portrayed abortion not as a matter of clear moral principle, but as a gray area where no universal truth can be applied.

She also sought to discredit the pro-life movement, suggesting that people are “not thinking critically” about abortion. She claimed that leaders of NGOs, advocacy groups, and government “have no interest in assisting you in thinking critically.” Instead, she accused them of offering “slogans about what you should do, what you shouldn’t do” while promoting the same underlying ideals.

Finally, Kissling turned her attention to the men in the audience, acknowledging that there is “some truth to the value of reproduction and the ‘gift of life.’” She noted that in most countries, having a child is considered a wonderful thing, shouting: “It is great to have a child!” But she quickly pivoted, pointing at the men and saying: “And you know something, you guys can’t do it.” She suggested that her “psychological mind” sees this as a problem, claiming that there is “a lot of jealousy” because men cannot give birth.

She then asked the men directly: “How many of you would like to be able to be pregnant?” Most did not raise their hands, though one man did. When she pressed further, asking, “Why don’t you want to have a baby?” audience members offered answers like “because it hurts.” Kissling said that in every country where she has posed this question, no more than two men ever volunteer.

Lila Rose’s Opening Statement

Lila Rose began her opening remarks with a sobering story from Lexington, Kentucky. Police received a call about a newborn child, and when they entered the home, they discovered the body of a baby boy, dead, wrapped in a towel, stuffed inside a black trash bag, and hidden in a closet. His mother, a 21-year-old college student, admitted that she had given birth and then tried to erase every trace of him. She was later charged with abuse of a corpse, tampering with evidence, and concealing the murder of a child.

Rose reflected: “This little boy’s life ended in the dark. Discarded like trash, as if he had no worth at all.” She pressed the audience to recognize his humanity:

“Whether he died at birth or just after, he was not just a pregnancy, not just a fetus, he was a son.”

She then posed a piercing question: “Some call it only pregnancy loss, others insist that he not be referred to as a baby. Why?” Her answer was direct: “Because they fear the truth. To name him, is to admit his shared humanity.”

Pivoting from this story, Rose declared:

“This is what choice over life looks like. When the choice of adults is made supreme, not of the children, the lives of children, the lives of the vulnerable, become disposable. What about the child’s choice? That has not been represented here yet tonight.”

She asked the audience bluntly: “Should murder be legal? Then why do we excuse abortion?” Rose continued: “Abortion is the direct and intentional killing of an innocent human being. It is not an accident. That is the reality behind euphemisms like ‘choice’ and ‘healthcare.’”

She went on to describe the brutal reality of abortion procedures: how surgical abortions tear babies limb from limb, and how the abortion pill works by starving the child to death with drugs. Rose declared: “These are not acts of healing, these are acts of killing.”

To underscore the scale of the injustice, she cited the fact that nearly 3,000 children are aborted every day in America — about the same number of lives lost on 9/11. “It is wrong to kill an innocent human being. That is the case against abortion, simply. If that is always wrong, then since abortion does this, it is also always wrong, and it must be illegal, because the baby has value and deserves a choice to live.”

Rose then dismantled the two most common arguments used to defend abortion.

First, the claim that the infant in the womb is not a human being — which she rejected as “science denial.” Modern embryology, she explained, confirms that a distinct human life begins at conception.
Second, the argument that “sometimes it is ok.” She pointed to Frances Kissling’s own words in The Washington Post: “We can no longer pretend the fetus is invisible. We must end the fiction that an abortion at 26 weeks is no different than one at 6 weeks. We need to firmly and clearly reject post-viability abortions except in extreme cases.”

Rose replied: “That is wrong. The baby at 6 weeks is just as valuable as the baby at 26 weeks, or the toddler at two years old, or the adult at 26 years old. Any other lines we may draw are arbitrary and innately dehumanizing. Justice demands consistency. Killing pre-born children should be illegal for the same reasons that killing a newborn must be illegal, because our human value, our worth, is not based on our size, on our age, on a level of development, or on our location or dependency.”

She quoted the 14th Amendment: “No state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law,” and argued that this applies to every human being. She pointed out that the Ohio legislature has even called abortion “child murder.”

Rose explained that her case was supported not only by law but also by science and philosophy:

Law increasingly recognizes unborn children as human beings.
Science confirms that life begins at conception, marked by unique DNA.
Philosophy affirms the equal dignity of every member of the human family.

“Every human life is a human person, and equal legal protection should apply to all, or our laws are discriminatory and unjust.”

She reminded the audience that history provides grim lessons about what happens when societies allow the strong to dehumanize the weak. She pointed to the Nazis’ treatment of Jews and America’s history of slavery, where legal systems once justified oppression by denying humanity. “The logic of dehumanization is always the same,” she warned, “and it leads to grave atrocities.”

Turning to the argument of bodily autonomy, Rose acknowledged its importance but drew a sharp boundary: “My bodily autonomy as a woman… does not give me the right to destroy someone else’s body, especially not the bodies of children, who have no voice.”

She then broadened the point:

“It is so easy for the strong to dominate the weak, in the name of our own pursuits, our own values, our own ideals, and to forget their value. But they have value. All humans have value. All humans have equal value.”

Addressing Frances Kissling’s framing directly, Rose rejected the idea that women’s rights must be at odds with the rights of children. “True women’s empowerment cannot come from the bloodshed of our children. We should strive for equal value of child and woman in this country.”

Finally, she addressed the claim that abortion can be medically necessary, stating plainly: “Abortion is never medically necessary.” To support this, she cited the Dublin Declaration, signed by hundreds of medical professionals affirming that direct abortion is never required to save a mother’s life. True medical care, Rose argued, should treat both patients, mother and child, with dignity.

She closed with a call to responsibility and hope: “Parents have responsibility for their children. Even if those children are inconvenient to them. Even if they are seen as unwanted. Parents still have a responsibility. Instead of turning to violence against the most vulnerable as a solution to problems that we may face, we should be a society that uplifts the vulnerable. That makes life better for the vulnerable. That focuses our resources on supporting women and young families. That needs to be the future of our country, for our country to survive. The future is family. The future is children. We can’t have a more just and loving future on the broken bodies of children. The future must be life first, that is the only way forward.”

Rose ended with a plea to the audience:

“Stand with children, the pre-born, because they need us. They need our voice, our courage, and our love. Choose love, not violence.”

The Debate - Opening Statements Cross Examination

Frances Kissling Questions Lila Rose

Frances Kissling began by pressing Lila Rose on the implications of her position. Clearly upset, she asked: “If they are killing babies, what should we do? Should we put those people in jail?”

Rose responded without hesitation: “We should absolutely criminalize abortion. For anyone who provides abortion. And for those who intentionally and willfully do it.”

Kissling pushed further: “Is there anything else that we should be doing?”

Rose expanded her answer, pointing to the many ways society could better support women and families:

Expanding cash credits for parents, beginning before birth.
Increasing support for pregnancy resource centers and federally qualified health centers that do not provide abortions.
Ensuring that birth is free of cost for mothers.
Requiring that child support begin in the womb.

Kissling then challenged Rose on pregnancy counseling centers: “Are you aware of what goes on in pregnancy counseling centers, of similar nature? Because if you’re not, I’ll tell you.”

Rose calmly replied that she had personally volunteered in many pregnancy resource centers and emphasized that they operate without financial incentives from the government. When Kissling pressed whether they were perfect, Rose admitted: “No organization is perfect.” But she contrasted their mission with abortion clinics:

“I do know that at pregnancy resource centers, babies are not being dismembered like they are at abortion clinics. They offer resources for mothers that are not offered at Planned Parenthood or abortion providers. There is free and confidential support, and adoption referrals, things not provided at Planned Parenthood.” She reminded the audience that Planned Parenthood had been receiving over $500 million a year in taxpayer funding.

Kissling, visibly frustrated, accused Rose of avoiding her question and asked directly if pregnancy resource centers ever deceive women about how far along they are in pregnancy to prevent them from getting abortions.

Rose acknowledged that, as in any nonprofit, mistakes can be made because humans are fallible. But she pointed out that pregnancy resource centers provide hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of free support to low-income women, which abortion clinics simply do not.

Lila Rose Questions Frances Kissling

When it was her turn to ask questions, Lila Rose pressed Frances Kissling on the core inconsistencies of her position.

Rose began with a straightforward challenge: “Do children in the womb have any value?”

Kissling answered: “Yes, I think that they do. I think that all life has value. What that value is is complicated. They have the value of —” (she gestured with air quotes) “being. They exist, that is enough to give them value.”

Rose then asked: “Does the newborn child have less value than the adult woman?”

Kissling replied: “No.”

Rose followed up: “Why is that?”

Kissling responded bluntly: “Because it’s born.”

Rose pressed further: “So you are attaching the value to birth and not consciousness?”

Kissling admitted: “In some instances, yes.”

Rose challenged this: “Why? Why is birth the defining line?”

Kissling pushed back: “Why is consciousness? There are things that can be done for the newborn outside of the body of the woman that cannot be done for that entity, that fetus, that embryo which is inside her body. That in and of itself is an important distinction. Location.”

Rose clarified the implication: “So would it be your position then, that because the baby is in the body of the mother, the mother should be permitted to, at any juncture, at will, have an abortion?”

Kissling hesitated: “At any stage of pregnancy? No. I am particularly happy with the framework that was originally developed in Roe v. Wade.”

She then explained the trimester framework, describing how Roe divided pregnancy into three stages and limited states from prohibiting abortion until later in pregnancy.

Rose pressed her once more: “Why do you think different trimesters are morally different when it comes to killing the baby?”

The audio was distorted during Kissling’s reply, but Rose restated what she believed she heard: that “developmental abilities determine and confer more legal protections.” Unfortunately, the poor audio quality made it impossible to capture a full response.

Even so, this exchange revealed the weakness of Kissling’s framework. By attaching human rights to location or developmental stage, she reduced the value of life to arbitrary categories, whereas Rose consistently argued that human dignity and protection begin at conception.

Closing Remarks

At the end of the evening, both women offered closing statements that summed up their arguments and sought to leave a final impression on the audience. I would encourage you to watch it (beginning at 1:09:04)

Lila Rose:

"If we want a brighter future. If we want justice. If we not only want life, but a lifetime of choices, we must not pit the woman against the child."

Frances Kissling:

"The reality of the world that we live in. Throughout the world, through Gaza, through the Ukraine and onward and onward relative to that, is that every human life does not have equal value. Should it have equal value? Yes, in a way it should. But then you get into philosophy and you get into thought experiments."

Audience and Campus Reaction

Observers described Rose’s approach as clear, compelling, and persuasive. Students commented that her arguments were not narrowly religious but accessible to anyone, grounded in logic and moral clarity.

Catholic News Agency reported that some in the audience felt Rose “swept the floor” in terms of coherence and confidence. Even the event organizer was reportedly surprised at how decisively the crowd sided with life.

Why This Debate Matters

This exchange reveals more than just a single win for the pro-life movement. It demonstrates:

That important conversations on abortion can take place in respected academic settings.
That even in environments often assumed hostile to the pro-life cause, truth has the power to persuade.
That young people are open to hearing arguments about human dignity and the value of life.

The Rose vs. Kissling debate was more than a clash of ideas, it was a reminder that truth spoken with conviction can change hearts and minds. Lila Rose’s victory shows that the pro-life message is not only morally right but intellectually compelling.

For all who care about justice and human dignity, this debate is a call to continue speaking boldly, with compassion, until every child is recognized as the human being they are, worthy of life and protection.