This summer it will be 10 years since the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) released its bombshell undercover videos exposing the traffic in baby body parts by the abortion industry.
David Daleiden, Sandra Merrit, and other unnamed members of their investigative team exploded to prominence overnight as America was gripped by the horror they had exposed in their reporting: abortionists casually discussing the sale of baby body parts over wine and salad, haggling over the price of tiny human organs, describing how they would crush the baby “above” and “below” the organs they wished to sell.
Daleiden became the number one target of the abortion industry: the Man Who Knows Too Much. They called up their friends, and then-California Attorney General and future Vice President Kamala Harris met with Planned Parenthood officials in 2016. Planned Parenthood had been a donor to Harris, and she promptly ordered criminal investigations into both Daleiden and Merrit. Daleiden’s home was raided, and personal belongings seized.
Harris’s successor, Xavier Becerra – the future Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services under Joe Biden – decided to criminally prosecute both journalists for allegedly violating the recording laws of the state of California for videotaping those they were investigating without permission. These were unprecedented charges, but the purpose of this lawfare was to shut them up, keep them in court, and prevent them from releasing any further footage they might have – and they had plenty.
This week, all criminal charges against them were dropped; Daleiden appeared on the Michael Knowles Show on January 28 for his first interview to explain how it happened. Daleiden was defiant, reasserting his own innocence and the guilt of the abortion industry, and calling on pro-lifers to continue the fight against our modern-day barbarism.
Almost a decade later, it is worth recalling what Daleiden and his team uncovered. When hours of CMP’s footage of abortionist shoptalk were leaked by someone in Congress, I spent several days watching it and transcribing their speeches and banter. It is quite honestly some of the most chilling material I have ever listened to, and after several days of notetaking, I understood completely why the abortion lobby was doing everything to suppress it – and why they were coming after the journalists who recorded it with a vengeance.
Here is a short and incomplete list of what CMP captured on video:
Dr. Lisa Harris telling a laughing audience that people would empathize more with abortion providers if they knew how much abortionists deal with, like “the heads that get stuck that we can’t get out.”
Dr. Lisa Harris telling Daleiden that, “The three things in demand right now are liver, thymus, and bone marrow right now because those are the three things used to construct the humanized mouse models … They have mutant strains of mice that have no mouse immune system … and then you engraft human fetal liver, thymus, and bone marrow into the mouse. It grafts in and the cells can reconstitute a functioning human immune system in the mouse model.”
Dr. Uta Landy receiving appreciative chuckles when she mentioned getting grossed out during an abortion when an “eyeball fell on my lap.”
Dr. Deborah Nucatola chatting with Daleiden about keeping baby heads separate after the abortion for the customers who want to purchase brains.
Talcott Camp relating how important it is to make sure that the sharp edges of the shattered skull don’t cut the mother’s cervix on the way out.
Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Susan Robinson telling Daleiden that, “The fetus is a tough little object, and taking it apart … is very difficult.”
Dr. Ann Schutt-Aine, director of abortion services at Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, describing 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.”
An abortionist – I couldn’t identify her from the footage – affirming that the abortion victim photography used by pro-life activists is accurate: “I actually think we should be less about denying the reality of those images and more about acknowledging that, yeah, that’s quite a truth. So, given that we actually see the fetus the same way, and given that we might actually both agree that there’s violence in here, ask me why I come to work every day. Let’s just give them all the violence, it’s a person, it’s killing. Let’s just give them all that. And then the more compelling question is, ‘So, why is this the most important thing I could do with my life?’”
Renee Chelian, the owner of three Michigan abortion clinics, complaining about having difficulty in finding companies to get rid of all of the aborted baby body parts her clinics were accumulating. At one point, she suggested to a room full of laughing abortion workers that they simply give the dead babies back to the parents: “We were really tempted to give the fetus back. We could just give it to everybody in a gift bag and they could figure out what to do with it. It was their pregnancy. Why is it our problem? Nobody wants to talk about dead bodies … There was a point when Stericycle fired us that I had five months of fetal tissue in my freezers. We were renting freezers to put them in. It was all I thought about, was fetal tissue. Like, I was so consumed with fetal tissue, I was ready to drive to upper Michigan and have a bonfire.”
Daleiden chatting with various abortionists about “fetal tissue procurement,” and one middle-aged woman telling him with a cackle: “Liver’s a big thing right now.”
Again, that is just a summary of what the leaked footage revealed. I suspect Daleiden and his colleagues saw and heard much, much more. He may not be able to release more of his footage; the full details of the court’s decision have not yet been revealed.
But what CMP’s footage did reveal is more than enough to convict every pro-lifer to redouble our efforts to fight this bloody business tooth and nail. After nine years of lawfare, Daleiden is a free man. I look forward to seeing what he will do next.
