(LifeSiteNews) — When conservative YouTube star Brett Cooper left the Daily Wire to launch a solo career, she had accrued over 4 million subscribers. Over a million of those subscribers signed up in only four months. Her new channel, The Brett Cooper Show, racked up a million subscribers before she even published a single episode.
Cooper is only 23 years old but became a wildly popular Gen-Z commentator overnight. When her Daily Wire show, The Comment Section, launched it was, as she put it recently, a “rocket ship.” That hasn’t changed now that Cooper has gone independent, releasing more long-form content condemning pornography, detailing regret among trans-identifying teens, and exposing trans activists, along with her signature culture and lifestyle commentary.
READ: The Bud Light boycott worked: Major corporations are walking away from LGBT pride
In a recent marathon four-hour interview with Shawn Ryan, which shot to over a million views in just three days, Cooper detailed the ups and downs of her 23 years. Cooper detailed her parents’ divorce, the death of her brother, emancipating herself as a teen to go work in Hollywood, being homeschooled, deciding to get married young, and why she left the Daily Wire to go on her own.
But one aspect of Cooper’s cultural significance has gone largely unremarked upon: she is very pro-life. Back in 2023, she revealed on another podcast that her reasons for becoming pro-life were very personal.
.@imbrettcooper’s own father wanted her aborted—now she’s exposing the truth about abortion.🔥 pic.twitter.com/w2ChRik0Hx
— LifeSiteNews (@LifeSite) April 1, 2025
“My dad wanted me to be aborted,” Cooper told podcast hosts Graham Stephan and Jack Selby. “I was calling my mom about abortion, and I was like, ‘I’m just so conflicted right now … I know it’s morally wrong,’ and we were going back and forth, and my mom is incredible at showing both sides of it.… She would argue it from the perspective of the mother. She would argue it from the perspective of the protection of the unborn child. All of this.”
“We’d go back and forth; what makes the most sense. This was something she had changed her mind on a lot because she used to be pro-choice as well,” she said.
“And she was like: ‘I’m going to be very personal with you,’” Cooper recalled. “‘When we found out that I was pregnant Mike wanted you to be aborted. We knew our marriage was over. This obviously wasn’t planned at all, and he was like, ‘I want you to make an appointment and go.’ And she was like: ‘That totally changed my mind. I had not even considered that this would impact me personally; a mother of three; that would never be a concern of mine; having a life inside of me and being told to end that after going through multiple pregnancies and in that moment knowing that that was never something I could do.’”
Cooper recounted that powerful story again on Ryan’s podcast:
READ: Planned Parenthood trafficked minors for secret abortions with fake doctors’ notes: Missouri AG
Cooper noted that when her father suggested abortion, her mother told her father, “If you want this so badly, you go make the appointment,” but added, “he couldn’t bring himself to do it.” She has since forgiven him.
Cooper has detailed her pro-life conversion often. “I was ambivalently pro-choice until I learned a harsh truth: my dad wanted my mom to abort me,” she wrote at the Daily Wire in a column titled, “I was Ambivalently Pro-Choice. Then I Learned A Harsh Truth.” Learning that her mother decided not to abort her, “That shifted everything for me – how could I not see the value of that choice?”
In 2023, discussing campus culture, Cooper noted: “At UCLA, I saw girls treating abortion like it was Plan B – just another option after a night out. It’s not a casual fix; it’s ending a life to dodge responsibility.” She began to see the moral bankruptcy of “pro-choice” arguments. “The argument always circles back to ‘My body, my choice,’ but what about the baby? It’s a separate human with no say – how is that fair?” she asked on a different episode.
The following year, she addressed the campus debate about abortion again. “People scream about bodily autonomy with abortion, but the draft forces men into war with no choice at all. Women usually have agency before pregnancy happens – where’s the outrage there?” Cooper is blunt about what abortion actually is. “I’ve heard people say abortion saves the planet or fixes the economy – like, what?” she said. “Killing babies isn’t a solution to traffic or inflation; it’s unhinged.”
In post-Dobbs America, cultural influencers willing to defend the rights of unborn children are essential. For better or for worse, most Gen Z-ers derive their worldview from internet figures that they trust and have built a “relationship” with. There are few Gen-Z influencers who have accrued the cultural cache that Brett Cooper has built, and that makes her pro-life advocacy exceptionally valuable.
