A year after she successfully pushed Planned Parenthood’s sex education programs out of Utah schools, a Republican lawmaker is moving to effectively require teachers to show a video produced by anti-abortion activists.

When public school students learn about human development, they would have to watch a video “from an organization” that meets hyper-specific stipulations laid out in HB315 from Rep. Nicholeen Peck, R-Tooele.

“Meet Baby Olivia” and “Meet Baby Oliver,” three-minute computer-generated videos made by the controversial organization Live Action and called inaccurate by doctors’ groups, are seemingly the only films that meet the requirements of the legislation.

The Utah House of Representatives passed the bill 40-28 and is awaiting consideration in the Senate.

“We’re not being incredibly prescriptive on the brand of the video,” Peck told the House Education Committee last month, adding, “but the intent is to use this video because it’s so short and nice.”

Both Utah Superintendent of Public Instruction Molly Hart and a representative from the Utah Parent-Teacher Association voiced concern during that committee hearing that such a policy would circumvent processes established in state law for approving sexual education curriculum.

“The [Utah State Board of Education] and the Legislature have spent considerable time approving practices and procedures for vetting curriculum, and this is not it,” Hart said.

“Nearly all [schools] use videos already that are medically accurate,” Hart continued. “This shifts to a specific video that is not vetted by each community, and that is a major departure, and I think we need to look carefully at that.”

Video showings under the bill would also be treated differently than other sex education instruction in Utah, one of a handful of states that require parents to sign a permission slip before their child can learn the curriculum.

Hart noted the state board of education previously assessed the video to be included in resources for teachers, and “it did not meet criteria.”

Live Action, which produced the video, is best known for sending undercover activists into Planned Parenthood clinics to film hidden-camera footage, then publishing edited versions of it. A Slate reporter concluded in a 2013 investigation that the videos the organization circulates on social media are deceptively edited to exclude footage that doesn’t match its narrative.

Peck asked Live Action’s vice president of communication and governmental affairs, Noah Brandt, to help her present her bill. He described his employer as “a nonprofit that mostly makes educational materials and helps distribute them online and other places.”

Brandt said similar legislation — which he referred to as “the Baby Olivia Law or Baby Olivia Act” — has been signed into law in six other states: North Dakota, Tennessee, Kansas, Idaho, Indiana and Iowa.

Nearly all of those states have more restrictive abortion bans than Utah’s 18-week ban. The only exception is Kansas, where voters in 2022 rejected a constitutional amendment that would have said the document does not guarantee the right to an abortion.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, in a 2024 statement to CNN, labeled the “Baby Olivia” video “anti-abortion misinformation,” saying, it “is designed to manipulate the emotions of viewers rather than to share evidence-based, scientific information about embryonic and fetal development.”

“Many of the claims made in this video are not aligned with scientific fact,” the statement continued, “but rather reflect the biased and ideologic perspectives of the extremists who created the video. ACOG is strongly opposed to the spread of misinformation about reproductive health.”

Among the incorrect information included in the “Baby Olivia” video is its timeline of fetal development — rather than counting the embryo’s age from the last known period, which is standard in medicine, it begins at conception. That results in the development of the depicted fetus being two weeks ahead of an actual pregnancy.

Katharine Caldwell, a family medicine doctor with training in obstetrics, told lawmakers during a public comment period in February’s committee hearing that she’s delivered hundreds of babies in the Salt Lake Valley.

“It is a sensationalized, and inaccurate, and misleading representation of fetal development,” Caldwell said, adding, “Our children deserve medically accurate information from an unbiased source.”