David Daleiden says he decided to go after Planned Parenthood’s fetal tissue programs after a week of nightmares stemming from a conversation about it.
“I was crying and had nightmares for like seven days after that,” Daleiden said on a call with activists and media Tuesday night. “I felt this particular issue of abortion really deserved to be shouted from the rooftops.”
Twenty-six-year-old Daleiden has grabbed the attention of Congress and sparked a major battle over defunding Planned Parenthood with a series of videos exploring Planned Parenthood’s involvement in providing aborted fetal tissue for medical research.
Over 30 months, he collected hours of undercover footage with top Planned Parenthood officials and biomedical companies that contract with clinics for the tissue. He compiled it all into a series of videos, which have forced Planned Parenthood defend itself and fired up Republicans to try to strip the group’s federal dollars.
What sparked the idea for the investigation was a conversation five years ago with anti-abortion activist Mark Crutcher of Life Dynamics, Daleiden said Tuesday night in his most candid and detailed explanation of the project yet.
Crutcher made his own video more than a decade ago about Planned Parenthood’s involvement in providing aborted fetal tissue. After a three-hour conversation with Crutcher, Daleiden decided he had to do something.
What motivated him, he said, was an irony. Human fetuses are extremely useful for scientific research because they’re human. But to Daleiden and other abortion foes, the humanity of a fetus is the reason they believe abortions should be illegal in the first place.
“Their humanity is not considered fully equal enough to the rest of us in order to be fully protected by our law,” Daleiden said. “Yet it’s precisely the humanity of the unborn child that makes them so valuable for scientific exploration.”
Planned Parenthood has apologized for the “tone” used by its officials, but insists it has done nothing wrong by being compensated for fetal tissue. Federal law allows compensation — but only for overhead costs.
And that’s a key debate the videos have sparked — whether the $60 to $100 Planned Parenthood clinics appear to have collected per fetus goes beyond paying for just overhead costs. Daleiden says he’s sure it does. And bringing the public’s attention to that is the biggest positive effect of his videos, he believes.
Daleiden names two other things he feels his videos have done — they’ve proven that Planned Parenthood performs illegal abortion procedures in order to keep certain body parts intact, and show that those at the top of the organization have been involved in supplying aborted fetal tissue.
“I think what may be different now because of these videos and the public discourse about abortion is that the out-of-sight, out-of-mind mantra that propels the abortion movement for so long…that is now forever gone,” he said.
Disguised as representatives of a fake human tissue company, Daleiden and a female cohort secretly recorded hours of conversations with Planned Parenthood officials and employees of biomedical companies that have contracted with some of its clinics for aborted fetal tissue.
His group founded for the project, dubbed the Center for Medical Progress, released the first video in mid-July. Daleiden has since released nine others, the most recent on Tuesday.
There’s some remaining footage that Daleiden still wants to release but hasn’t been allowed to, due to a lawsuit brought by the National Abortion Federation, the professional association for U.S. abortion providers. Daleiden took videos at the group’s annual conference.
The NAF got a temporary restraining order from a federal court in California prohibiting him from releasing the footage, arguing that he deceitfully posed as an exhibitor and signed a nondisclosure agreement that he had no intention of honoring. The association also says Daleiden’s group broke a state law barring the recording of “confidential communication” without consent.
On Monday the Center for Medical Progress asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to overturn the lower court’s ruling, arguing that its First Amendment rights are being violated.
Even if Daleiden isn’t able to release that particular footage, he’s gained a permanent place among anti-abortion activists as someone who’s been able to put Planned Parenthood on the hotseat, as many others have long tried to do.
“What he is revealing is something like we have never seen in the pro-life movement,” said Katie Short, who is representing Daleiden in court as an attorney for the Life Legal Defense Foundation. “Those of us who have been doing this for decades say we’ve never seen anything like this before.”
