Anti-abortion movement gets a new-media twist

David French, an attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal group, gave her free advice when Planned Parenthood of Los Angeles threatened action, and appeared at her side during an interview with conservative TV talk-show host Bill O'Reilly. She also receives guidance from CRC Public Relations, a Washington-area firm that represents conservative clients and had a hand in the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign that targeted Democrat John F. Kerry during the 2004 presidential race.

Rose, the third of eight children, grew up in San Jose. Her father is an engineer for Sun Microsystems. She was home-schooled, she wrote in an e-mail, and also attended a part-time Christian school and a junior college throughout high school. When she was 15, she said, she founded Live Action and began giving antiabortion presentations to schools and youth groups.

Between 2006 and 2008, Rose attended four workshops at the Leadership Institute, a Virginia-based educational foundation that teaches conservatives how to polish their communication skills.

In fall 2006, when she was a UCLA freshman, she and fellow conservative activist James O'Keefe came up with the idea to infiltrate clinics.

Rose, by e-mail, and O'Keefe, in a phone interview, said they were inspired by the work of Mark Crutcher, a Texas antiabortion activist who in 2002 taped fake calls to hundreds of Planned Parenthood clinics around the country featuring women posing as pregnant minors.

They also found an unlikely source of inspiration: "Rules for Radicals," a handbook on grass-roots organizing by Saul Alinsky, a legendary left-wing activist who was an inspiration to President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Among Alinsky's most famous admonitions is one that O'Keefe said he and Rose took to heart: "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."

O'Keefe, 24, said he and Rose have received criticism from some of their associates for using deception. "It's a pretty complicated ethical issue," he said, "but we believe there is a genocide and nobody cares, and you can use these tactics and it's justified."

Rose and O'Keefe visited their first clinic -- UCLA's Arthur Ashe Student Health and Wellness Center -- in 2006. They videotaped an employee telling them "some pretty bad things," said O'Keefe, including that the fetus is a collection of cells. "That's what set us in motion."

"The videos," O'Keefe added, "are not supposed to necessarily show people breaking laws. They are supposed to change hearts and minds."

That's precisely the effect Rose's work had on Mark Bucher, the Tustin businessman who sent the videos to Orange County supervisors.

"I have never gotten riled up about Planned Parenthood getting taxpayer money to do abortions," Bucher said. "I got riled up when I saw that this organization doesn't care about their legal obligation to make sure some 13-year-old girl isn't going to be molested by a 31-year-old man anymore. No matter where you stand on the abortion issue, that ought to bother you."

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robin.abcarian@latimes.com