“If they're a patient, they're a person, and if they're a person they deserve our respect and our protection.”, says Dr. William Lile in a special episode of CareCast, Care Net's podcast on family, faith, and life, with Roland Warren, Care Net's president and CEO.

This special episode of CareCast was recorded live at Care Net's 2023 National Conference in Mobile, Alabama. One of our keynote speakers was Dr. William Lile, known as the ProLife Doc. Using the tools and abortionists that left behind at a clinic he helped to shut down, Dr. Lile created a series of educational videos about the grim reality of abortion. Listen in on the conversation between Roland and Dr. Lile about defending life. 

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Dr. William Lile is a board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist, as well as the former OB-GYN department chair at Sacred Heart Hospital. He taught at the University of Florida and the Florida State Medical School OB-GYN residency programs. He is also a medical advisor of the Florida Human Life Protection Amendment while serving as a member of Focus on the Family's Physicians Research Council. Dr. Lile is a frequent guest on both television and syndicated radio shows. Dr. Lile sat down with Dr. Lile during the conference to chat about his work and his keynote address to our attendees.

What follows is a portion of the interview. You can find the full interview at the link above. Read portions of the conversation between Roland Warren (RW) Dr. William Lile (WL)

RW: Well Dr. Lile, it's a pleasure to have you at the 2023 Care Net Conference right here in Mobile, Alabama, not far from where you are in Pensacola. So it's a godsend that you were able to find time out of your schedule to spend time with us. Thank you.

WL: It's an honor to be here. Just be able to share the way that we can serve the Kingdom together and defend God's preborn in the womb. So we appreciate the honor.

RW: Yes, so talk a little bit about just what you shared with the attendees. We have about 1600 people here, one of our biggest, I guess our biggest conference ever and got a standing ovation, not surprised there. Just an amazing presentation. Why don't you talk about what you shared with folks from Care Net?

WL: Well, the real key is that these are pre-born babies and there's a difference between the unborn and the pre-born. Unborn just means at this moment in time the baby is unborn. Pre-born implies that the baby will be born, kind of like you watch a pregame show, you don't watch an un-game show, you watch the pregame show because the next thing is that you're going to watch the game. These are my patients and my patients are dying. My patients are in the womb. We treat the pre-born as patients and we really took everybody to medical school today to really give them new tools that they can use to defend the pre-born.

We are now routinely, not just doing ultrasounds and diagnosing conditions, we are treating these conditions to save the baby's life. We are routinely doing blood transfusions directly to babies as early as 18-weeks gestation. You speak about how we need to treat our neighbors as ourselves. Donating blood is a way to respect and treat your neighbor as yourself. We are now taking donated blood, giving it directly into the blood supply of the baby to save a baby's life. That is treating the pre-born as patients.

But we're also doing spina bifida corrective surgery, open heart surgery, laser vascular surgery, and even recently at Children's Hospital in Boston, brain surgery for a condition called a Galen malformation. If they're a patient, they're a person, and if they're a person they deserve our respect and our protection.

RW: Yeah, and I just thought that that was just incredibly fascinating, you know, making that distinction, right? I think you might even use this analogy: if you have two people that come into an emergency room and the doctors help save one and actually kill the other one, would people say that that was health care? Would a doctor even say that that was health care?

WL: That's not health care. Your distinction is so powerful. One of the tools we'll have when we do training is we will tell people when they were speaking to an elected official, ask them number one are you an advocate for patient’s rights? Well if they're running for office of course they're going to say yes I'm an advocate for patient’s rights. Then ask the second question, are you an advocate for patients who weren't born in the United States?

Well of course they're going to say yes I'm an advocate for patient’s rights that weren't born in the United States. Then say help me defend my patients who were not born in the United States yet and that three-letter word yet carries a lot of weight because they are our patients.

Even Dr. Sanjay Gupta we went through an interview that he did on the vascular brain surgery of a baby with the Galen malformation in Sanjay Gupta from CNN himself said when it comes to fetal surgery we have two patients that go to the operating room. Not one patient two patients and patients have rights most of the states in the United States now actually have patient's bills of rights and if we're treating them as patients then they have rights and we need to defend them.

RW: Yeah absolutely so how do they you know as you said preborn babies will be a patient in the operating room and as soon as they go out of the operating room they are no longer a person right because there are no patients that aren't persons.

WL: There's a condition that we didn't even have time to go over today which is called a Delayed Interval Delivery and a delayed interval delivery only happens with twins. We had a case in Pensacola where the mom came for a TobyMac concert a few years ago and she was pregnant with identical twins and she was about 26 weeks along. She came to the concert with identical twin boys conceived from one egg and one sperm then before day 13 she divided the two identical copies and when she was at the concert we had a little medical emergency she actually broke her bag of water at the concert. She was dancing she was you know into the spirit and into the moment. EMS came they brought her to our hospital before we could do anything to stop her labor, she quickly developed full labor and she delivered baby A right there in our labor and delivery. And that baby went to our new $70 million pediatric hospital with the NICU, all the doctors and nurses, and technology. It was two placentas and two sacs. The second baby was still on the inside. The placenta was working well and the sac was still intact.

So our maternal-fetal medicine doctors approached her and said, look, you have two patients, you have two babies here on the inside. Baby A is now in our NICU, getting great care with all the doctors, nurses, and technology we have over there. Baby B is in the best environment possible. Baby B is still in your womb. We'd like to give you some steroids, which will help mature the baby's brain, protect the baby's lungs, and protect the baby's bowel. We'd like to give you some antibiotics so you don't get an infection. We'd like to continuously monitor that baby.

We don't just get days. We don't just get weeks. There was a case up in Tennessee where it was six weeks between two babies being born, two twins. You had twin A being born in June; and twin B being born in August. Well, it's amazing that they're going to start, they'll be in different grades in school as identical twins. But here's the real key. Yeah, I mean, it's a cool technology; and they can be twins and born six weeks apart. But what doesn't make any sense is twin A who's in the NICU has all the rights and protection that you or I would have in a cardiac care unit.

Yet if mom were to choose, she could go to a state like New York, my home state in New Jersey, and she could legally abort the baby that is still inside of her womb. Our rights are given by God, and it's the duty of good government to defend those rights, and we don't lose our rights due to our geographic location. Twin A was in the NICU 100 yards away, twin B is still in her womb. You tell me from one egg in one sperm, how does this baby have rights, and the one on the inside does not have rights?

So we need to defend them, but we're doing the best that we can to show how we treat the pre-born as patients and that a patient is a person no matter how small.

RW: It's super powerful and really it's a good segue into just the spiritual battle that we're in because, you know, if you're in a situation where, you know, and this is where we see the culture shift, I mean increasingly there are more and more people that as you walk them through they're acknowledging, this is a life but they're coming to this next point which is, it's a life worth sacrificing, right? And it really is a spiritual battle and you really link that so well in terms of the medical construct that kind of leads to that. Why don't you talk a little bit about that when you were kind of laying that out for folks in terms of how to think about that? To kind of go from the medicine to the gospel if you will.

WL: Sure. Well, in Genesis 1:26, we know that we're created in the image of God. This is after God had created all the billions of planets and stars and galaxies and then he focused on the earth, all the mammals, the birds, the fish but then at the end he said, let us make man in our image. And all this amazing creation was not created in the image of God. At that moment we are all created in the image of God at the moment of conception, not the day that we are born. So what is abortion at its core? Abortion is an attack against the image of God.

Why does somebody burn the American flag? If you hate the United States, the American flag represents the image of the United States. If you hate the United States, you're going to burn the flag. Abortion is the same thing. If you have a hatred toward God and the baby in the womb was created in the image of God, you want to destroy that image of God. We know that in Psalm 51:5, not only are we created in the image of God when we were born, but we are created from the moment of our conception and that is key.

If God loved us all enough that He sent His son, lived the perfect life, gave His life for all of us on the cross, was dead and buried for three days, then conquered death, rose again for all of us, and we weren't sinners just from the time of our birthday. We were sinners from the time our mothers conceived us. So, if God loves the pre-born in the womb enough, and when He knit us in our mother's womb, Jeremiah says, if God loved us all that much that He sent His Son for the babies immediately after conception, then we have a duty to defend them and protect them, because like you said earlier, they are our neighbors, and we need to protect our neighbors, treat our neighbors as ourselves. The pre-born are not only patients, they are our neighbors.

We even do blood donations directly to babies to save their lives. So if a church has a blood drive and you have O-negative blood, your O-negative blood could be used to save the life of a baby as early as 18-weeks gestation, and that's following the greatest commandment, love your neighbor as yourself.

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