The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.
Doctors, anti-abortion advocates, and a mother spoke in favor of a bill that would require Ohio public schools to show a video about fetal development to students starting in the third grade.
State Rep. Melanie Miller, R–Ashland, recently introduced Ohio House Bill 485, also known as the “Enact Baby Olivia Act.”
The three-minute Meet Baby Olivia video was produced by Live Action, which advocates against abortion, and it shows fertilization and fetal growth.
Abortion rights advocates call the video misleading and inaccurate.
The minimum the bill requires is showing either the Baby Olivia video or an ultrasound video at least three minutes long.
Eleven people submitted supporter testimony and five people testified in person during Tuesday’s Ohio House Education Committee meeting.
“The Baby Olivia educational video provides clear, scientific, and visually compelling evidence of fetal development and humanity,” Dr. Bill Lile, a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist who is also known as the ‘The ProLife Doc,’ said during his testimony. “These babies in the womb are not abstract ideas — they are living, growing human beings, and they are patients.”
Abortion is legal in Ohio up until 22 weeks of pregnancy. Ohio voters passed a ballot measure in 2023 that added protections to abortion care and reproductive rights to the state’s constitution.
Dr. Alicia Thompson, a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist, said the Baby Olivia video shows human life begins the moment of fertilization.
“The video illustrates these realities in a way that is both scientifically sound and accessible to students, using clear visual milestones to demonstrate the beauty and complexity of early human life,” she said during her testimony.
Planned Parenthood calls the “Baby Olivia” video “inaccurate, misleading, and manipulative.”
Right to Life Action Coalition of Ohio President Kate Makra said, “The video is medically accurate.”
Planned Parenthood notes that the video counts the embryo’s age from conception, which doctors do not do; claims a fetal heartbeat can be detected at six weeks despite there not being a heart formed and this sound actually an electrical flutter where the heart will later form; and inaccurately displays the look of the embryo, mischaracterizes its activity, and leaves out critical information about at what point it can survive outside the womb.
The Ohio bill would require the video to be shown to students every year starting in third grade through twelfth grade, beginning with the 2026-27 school year.
State Rep. Sean Brennan, D-Parma, questioned showing the same video to a third grader and a high school senior.
“Is it appropriate to show the same video to elementary school kids, middle school kids, high school kids?” Brennan, a former educator, asked. “Wouldn’t it be a better idea to allow a lot more flexibility to the district to tailor the video to the students’ developmental capabilities?”
State Rep. Gayle Manning, R-Avon, spent much of her career teaching third grade.
“I can’t imagine explaining to my children what is going on in the video when at third grade, many kids don’t have any idea,” she said. “To me, that is something that a parent should have a discussion before I would, as a teacher.”
Makra agreed parents should have conversations with their children about fetal development, but said that does not always happen.
“I think a lot of parents are not doing that, and that’s why we find there are so many unplanned pregnancies,” she said. “I think even a young child would be able to look at the images and be able to gain an understanding of what’s being conveyed in the video.”
Ohio students deserve to know the science behind conception, Makra said.
“Ohio’s science curriculum requires teaching animal and plant reproduction from the First Grade — seed growth and frog cycles — yet inexplicably skips human prenatal development,” she said in her testimony. “If we teach life cycles of plants and animals, why aren’t we teaching humans from conception?”
Former Ohio state Rep. Jena Powell said the purpose of the bill is educational, not political.
“It gives young Ohioans access to scientific, factual information about the earliest stages of human life,” she said, reflecting on seeing her own baby’s ultrasound. “By seeing what happens inside the womb—the heartbeat, the movement, the growth—students will gain a deeper understanding of biology, of life, and of the impact their choices can have on others.”
Similar bills have been introduced in more than 20 other states so far this session and Idaho, Kansas, North Dakota, Tennessee, Iowa, and Indiana have enacted similar bills into law.
