CHARLESTON, W.Va. | West Virginia’s Republican-majority Senate greenlit a bill on Tuesday that would make a video on fetal development produced by an anti-abortion group required viewing in public schools.
Live Action’s “Baby Olivia” video, which West Virginia lawmakers want to show in eighth- and 10th-grade classrooms, has received criticism from physicians and educators who say it misleads viewers.
It is already being used in some schools in North Dakota, though it wasn’t specifically mandated in the law passed last year in that state. Similar bills have been proposed in Iowa, Kentucky and Missouri.
The bill now heads to the House of Delegates for consideration.
The animated video is meant to visualize development in the womb, depicting an egg being fertilized and implanted and progressing through embryonic and fetal developments occurring throughout a pregnancy. A voiceover introduces viewers to Olivia as an illustration of a fully developed baby in utero appears on screen. Olivia’s mouth and eyes open and close, and her hands move.
The video refers to a “heartbeat” at six weeks. At that point, the embryo isn’t yet a fetus and doesn’t have a heart. It also describes the animated figure’s motion and actions with words like “playing,” “exploring,” “sighing,” and making “speaking movements” — language critics have said assign human traits and properties to a fetus that are more sophisticated than medicine can prove.
Speaking during his chamber’s floor Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Tom Takubo, a Republican, said he couldn’t support the bill because it contains “grossly inaccurate” information contradictory to science. A working pulmonologist, he had pushed for a change to the bill that would have required any video shown in school to be scientifically accurate. That effort failed.
“If we’re going to codify something that we’re going to teach, ‘this is fact,’ it needs to be fact,” he said.
Republican Sen. Amy Grady, the chamber’s education chair and a public school teacher, said the legislation is not “anti-abortion.”
Ms. Grady, who voted for the state’s near-total abortion ban that passed in 2022, said all of her students have different learning styles: some like reading textbooks, some are more tactile learners, others visual learners.
“Those photos in a textbook help some students, but not all of them,” she said. “This computer-generated image or this computer-generated video, an animated video, puts it in terms that kids can understand and it lets them see it, and lets them see the growth happen.”
Republican Sen. Patricia Rucker said the video “is not political and it is not religious: It is a springboard for conversation.”
Democratic Sen. Mike Woelfel said, however, that he fears it runs afoul of the First Amendment right to religious freedom. His personal belief, like Ms. Grady’s, is that life begins at conception, but not everyone agrees, he said.
He mentioned Jewish students, citing a belief in that faith that life begins at birth. The same argument has been used to challenge abortion bans across the country in court.
“I don’t have any problem with the video. I would gladly show that video in the Catholic school that my grandchildren attend,” Mr. Woelfel said. “But I’ve taken an oath to obey the Constitution and to uphold it, and for that reason, I would urge a no vote.”
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