Pro-life activist Lila Rose shares her story

Liberty University students welcomed the school’s youngest convocation speaker on Friday, 22-year-old pro-life activist Lila Rose.

A recent graduate of UCLA, Rose now works full time for Live Action, a non-violent, nonprofit youth-led organization she founded at age 15. She has traveled throughout the United States, Ireland, Mexico and Canada sharing her message.

She told students that the United States is in a state of “pending national emergency.”

“Every single day that we get up in the morning and go about our day, there are over 3,500 lives that are legally, cruelly destroyed in our country, in our own neighborhoods sometimes,” Rose said.

Live Action uses new media to educate and mobilize local and national audiences. Videos of the group’s undercover investigations in multiple states have gone viral on the Internet, exposing sexual abuse and human trafficking cover-ups as well as racism within the abortion industry, particularly the pro-choice organization Planned Parenthood, which Rose said receives more than $350 million from taxpayers each year.

During her message, Rose showed a portion of a video from one investigation, which documented a manager at a Planned Parenthood location in New Jersey encouraging an actor posing as a pimp to lie about the ages of his underage prostitutes on the organization’s documents.

“Laws are meant to protect those that can’t protect themselves … but what happens when the laws themselves turn against the weak, turn the strong against the weak and the weak are even killed? Then we have injustice at the very heart of our legal system, and that’s what the Supreme Court case did when they vandalized our great Constitution in Roe v. Wade in 1973,” she said.

Rose said she first learned about abortion when she was 9 years old and began making pro-life educational presentations at churches at the age of 14. She said she has dedicated her life to ending abortion.

“Is there a human rights issue greater; is there an amount of bloodshed that is greater than in the lives lost to abortion? I will switch issues if somebody can find me a greater human rights abuse that our nation or our world faces.”

Rose urged students to make time to get involved with the pro-life movement and to realize that the freedom to fight for innocent lives at risk for abortion is a gift as well as a responsibility.

“We’re the ones that are being targeted by the abortion industry, we’re the ones that have the power to change our nation,” she said after convocation. “We’ll be the leaders of tomorrow, so it’s up to us to change the course of American history here and to fight for a country that protects all people.”

• Rose has appeared on TV’s The O’Reilly Factor, Hannity’s America, The Glenn Beck Show and The Laura Ingraham Show. Her work has been featured by Reuters, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times and the National Review. In 2006, during her freshman year at UCLA, she founded “The Advocate,” a pro-life student magazine that is distributed at more than 80 high school and college campuses across America. She was awarded the inaugural Life Prize by the Gerard Health Foundation in 2008 and the Young Leader Award by Susan B. Anthony’s List in 2010.