Six years ago, the then-unknown Center for Medical Progress stunned America with a string of undercover videos showing abortion executives, activists, and lobbyists casually discussing their cash-for-baby-body-parts schemes. David Daleiden and his colleagues had posed as purchasers of baby organs and gone undercover to abortion conferences across the United States, capturing on film conversations and lectures that were never meant to be public. Even committed supporters of abortion were shaken.
The abortion industry sprang into action. Legions of lawyers leveled every charge they could think of at the investigators, and lawsuits were filed to muzzle them. As bad as the videos of abortionists casually discussing the process of crushing a pre-born baby “above and below” saleable organs were, many suspected that the CMP had even more damning footage.
The National Abortion Federation filed their lawsuit on July 31, 2015, terrified by what Daleiden might have filmed. A court order immediately blocked the release of the footage, but when it was turned over to Congress, someone leaked hours of it online. It has since been largely purged from the Internet (it was initially downloadable in a giant torrent) and I reviewed the horrifying footage before it vanished. In 2017, Daleiden defied a court order and released a three-minute preview of the remaining NAF footage before it too was deleted.
On April 7, the executives at the NAF breathed a sigh of relief when a judge from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted them a summary judgement and “a permanent injunction barring David Daleiden, Biomax Procurement Services LLC, the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), and their agents and co-conspirators from releasing recordings and materials they illegally obtained at NAF’s educational meetings.” NAF’s CEO, The Very Reverend Katherine Ragsdale, announced that she was thrilled in a press release.
This is not surprising. In the three minute clip Daleiden released in 2017 and the footage dumped online by a Congressional staffer in 2015, we have a small idea of just how damning the discussions in these “educational meetings” were.
Dr. Lisa Harris told a laughing audience that people would empathize more with abortionists if they knew how hard it was to deal with “the heads that get stuck that we can’t get out,” referring to the heads of pre-born babies being extracted from the womb.
Dr. Uta Landy concurred, also receiving chuckles when she described being grossed out when “an eyeball fell on my lap,” apparently jarred loose from the baby head she was removing.
Dr. Deborah Nucatola, one of the first abortionists to feature in CMP video, told Daleiden that baby heads are sometimes kept separate after abortions are performed for customers who want to purchase the brains.
Talcott Camp also had comments about baby heads, noting how important it was to ensure that the edges of the baby’s shattered skull doesn’t cut the mother’s cervix on the way out. Babies are sometimes hard to abort, said Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Susan Robinson, who told Daleiden that: “The fetus is a tough little object, and taking it apart…is very difficult.”
And perhaps most horrifying of all, Dr. Ann Schutt-Aine, director of abortion services at Planed Parenthood Gulf Coast, described how she dodges the laws on partial-birth abortion (PBA): “If I’m doing a procedure, and I see that I’m in fear that’s it about to come past the umbilicus [navel], I might ask for a second set of forceps to hold the body at the cervix and pull off a leg or two so it’s not a PBA.”
“Pull off a leg or two.”
These are the sorts of conversations and lectures that David Daleiden and his colleagues recorded that the National Abortion Federation so desperately wanted to suppress. Only a few people saw the leaked footage and the preview before it was largely scrubbed from the Internet (several clips are still accessible for those who know where to look). It is no wonder that the NAF are celebrating today. They claim that their “services” are no different than any other medical industry, but no other group would go to such lengths to prevent the public from hearing what gets discussed at their conferences and in their seminars.
For almost 6 years, they have been trying to prevent the macabre details of their brutal business from seeing the light of day. It appears they have succeeded.
