Coverage of issues surrounding abortion in the mainstream media is seldom dispassionate or objective. Reporters are people, and it’s the rare person who can keep his or her true feelings under wraps to get the job done.
But, David Daleiden is one of those people. For years, the passionate 26-year-old pro-life activist — a Catholic based in Southern California’s Orange County, who describes himself as an “investigative journalist” — put his own emotions on a shelf. He then immersed himself in the business of trafficking in the body parts of aborted fetuses, and especially Planned Parenthood’s key role in the trade.
His series of undercover, hidden-camera videos, focusing on both Planned Parenthood and labs that acquire the baby body parts, have proven explosive, triggering much news coverage and Congressional hearings.
Considering Planned Parenthood’s role as a reliable funder of Democrat candidates, it’s unlikely that the organization will disappear. But, on Oct. 13, PP head Cecile Richards announced that the group would no longer accept “reimbursements” for supplying researchers with the brains and organs of slain unborn infants.
From The Los Angeles Times:
David Daleiden, founder of the Center for Medical Progress, called the policy change “an admission of guilt.”
“If the money Planned Parenthood has been receiving for baby body parts were truly legitimate ‘reimbursement,’ why cancel it?” Daleiden asked in a statement. “This proves what CMP has been saying all along — Planned Parenthood incurs no actual costs, and the payments for harvested fetal parts have always been an extra profit margin.”
As might be expected, PP has hit back at Daleiden’s group, claiming the videos were obtained by fraud and are deceptively edited (apparently that’s not true).
This has brought about a case of strange bedfellows, as, in August, Nathan Runkle, the founder and president of Mercy for Animals, penned a USA Today column defending the practice of making undercover videos. His group used them to expose inhumane farming practices.
He wrote:
Undercover investigations, it turns out, are not just effective tools for exposing and ending animal abuse, they fall squarely within our fundamental First Amendment rights. In the case of the videos we have produced, the only people who have a problem with that are those with something to hide.
Then today, The Washington Post put out a surprisingly even-handed and detailed profile of Daleiden (good for the WaPo and writer Sandhya Somashekhar!).
Click here to read the whole thing, but here are a couple of excerpts:
While on an assignment for a professor, Daleiden wound up at a conference on stem cell research where a presenter mentioned that the results of her work had been drawn from the brains of aborted fetuses.
“I thought, wait, did I hear that right?” he recalled.
His horror stuck with him for years, as did what he sees as a cruel paradox — that when it comes to a fetus, “its humanity isn’t considered valid, yet it’s precisely that same humanity that makes it valuable for experimentation.”
………
Whatever the outcome, Daleiden’s project has already exceeded the wildest expectations of antiabortion activists. He has released 10 videos from clinic visits, Planned Parenthood meetings and lunches with executives, and put the abortion issue back on the front burner in Washington and on the presidential campaign trail.
Image: Fox News screenshot
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