Monday February 16, 2009
12-Year-Old Stuns Pro-Choice Teacher and School with Pro-Life Presentation
By Kathleen Gilbert
TORONTO, February 11, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - 12-year-old "Lia" of Toronto has become a star at her school and on Youtube with her five-minute pro-life speech, crafted for a school competition. Despite discouragement and outright opposition, Lia's presentation was so well done that she reportedly won the contest she was told she would be disqualified from, due to the "controversial" message of her speech.
Lia's mother broke the story of her daughter's win in an e-mail to the Moral Outcry blog. LifeSiteNews.com attempts to contact Lia and her parents for comment were unreturned by press time. The speech, however, is available in its entirety on Youtube, where it has been viewed over 100,000 times and sparked a heated discussion. (See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOR1wUqvJS4&feature=channel_page)
"What if I told you that right now, someone was choosing if you were gonna live or die?" begins the charismatic seventh-grader in a practice recording of the speech posted on Youtube. "What if I told you that this choice wasn't based on what you could or couldn't do, what you'd done in the past, or what you would do in the future? And what if I told you, you could do nothing about it?
"Fellow students and teachers, thousands of children are right now in that very situation. Someone is choosing without even knowing them whether they are going to live or die. That someone is their mother. And that choice is abortion."
Lia, speaking easily and with sunny enthusiasm, fires off answers to several common objections in the brief speech.
"Why do we think that just because a fetus can't talk or do what we do, it isn't a human being yet?" She asks. "Some babies are born after only five months. Is this baby not human?
"We would never say that. Yet abortions are performed on 5-month-old fetuses all the time. Or do we only call them humans if they're wanted?
"Think about the child's rights, that were never given to it. No matter what rights the mother has, it doesn't mean we can deny the rights of the fetus," she said. "We must remember that with our rights and our choices come responsibilities, and we can't take someone else's rights away to avoid our responsibilities."
Lia's mother says that the topic was of her own choosing, and that she was determined not to back down, even after teachers told her it was "too mature" and "too controversial."
"She was also told that if she went ahead with that topic, she would not be allowed to continue on in the speech competition," Lia's mother wrote in the email to the Moral Outcry blog. "Initially, I tried helping her find other topics to speak on, but, in the end, she was adamant. She just felt she wanted to continue with the topic of abortion. So she forfeited her chance to compete in order to speak on something she was passionate about."
But according to updates posted on the blog (http://bound4life.com/blog/2009/02/06/y-o-p-p#updates), Lia's pro-choice teacher was so moved by the speech that she decided to allow her to participate in the competition after all. Lia won for her class.
The speech then sparked a controversy at the school wide competition last Thursday, where the school principal and teachers reportedly all agreed that Lia's speech was the obvious winner - but the judges had decided to disqualify her because of the topic.
By the end of the day, one judge who was offended by the pro-life speech agreed to step down, leaving the remaining judges to reverse the decision and declare Lia the school wide winner, advancing Lia to represent her school at a regional competition.
Lia's mother said the girl's determination to present her message stemmed from her family's participation in the pro-life movement.
"We were invited to participate in a 'Life Tape Siege,'" she wrote. "Once my kids heard of this invitation, they all agreed: 'We have to do that!' Since then, Lia's passion for seeing abortion end has continued."