Undercover journalist David Daleiden and his lawyers are juggling two separate cases this week that attack him for exposing Planned Parenthood’s aborted baby body parts trade.
One is a criminal trial that began with former pro-abortion California Attorney General Kamala Harris. A preliminary hearing in the case began last week with a witness for the abortion industry admitting that the undercover videos were “not altered.”
The second, a civil lawsuit filed by Planned Parenthood, moved forward with a pre-trial conference Monday with U.S. District Judge William Orrick, Courthouse News reports.
The civil lawsuit accuses Daleiden, Sandra Merritt and Albin Rhomberg of the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) of damaging Planned Parenthood’s reputation through their investigation. The abortion chain also claims it had to increase security because of threats and violence after CMP released the undercover videos. However, Orrick dismissed most of Planned Parenthood’s security claims in July.
On Monday, attorney Charles LiMandri, who represents CMP, told Orrick that he plans to present evidence of babies being born alive in abortion facilities and of their organs being harvested and sold for a profit to researchers, according to Courthouse News.
“If Planned Parenthood was violating the law with regard to the four affiliates, that shows there was a profit motive for why babies would be born alive,” LiMandri said, arguing for the inclusion of the evidence.
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Data from state health departments and the Centers for Disease Control prove that babies do survive abortions. Whether LiMandri’s argument will succeed in convincing the judge, however, is uncertain.
Here’s more from the report:
Orrick said he will likely exclude that evidence as irrelevant.
“There’s no evidence I’ve seen so far that babies were born alive at Planned Parenthood facilities,” he said.
“The motive of the project is not as important – or is not important at all – except for what was actually done. And whether the strategy that was taken, whether it was for a great reason or not, is not relevant. It is really more – were the defendants allowed to do the things they actually did,” he added.
LiMandri persisted, arguing that experts would be able to infer that this was the case as biomedical research facilities received fetal hearts from Planned Parenthood affiliates.
“I’m not sure experts can draw inferences, and there’s not actual evidence of a baby being born alive during an abortion procedure,” Orrick said.
But the judge said he would not stop LiMandri from putting on a defense.
The civil trial is scheduled to begin Oct. 2 with jury selection, and continue through Nov. 8 in California, the report states.
Planned Parenthood initially sought more than $20 million in damages, but Orrick ruled against most of the abortion chain’s claims. Now, the alleged damages sought by the lawsuit amount to less than $100,000.
According to a CMP statement to LifeNews, Orrick’s ruling in July “affirms that citizen journalists exercising their First Amendment rights to speak and publish cannot be held liable for any bad actions taken by others in the free marketplace of ideas, absent a clear showing of defamation or intent to incite imminent lawless action. Planned Parenthood could provide no evidence or testimony in the case to back up either accusation, and so a lawsuit that was once an avalanche of charges has been reduced to essentially a trespassing dispute.”
Daleiden has been defending himself in court for years after he exposed gruesome baby body parts harvesting practices at Planned Parenthood in 2015. Many of the charges against him have been dropped, but the California cases continue.
The Center for Medical Progress investigation exposed numerous atrocities inside Planned Parenthood abortion facilities across the U.S. Its findings prompted investigations by the U.S. House and Senate, as well as a number of states.
The committees concluded by recommending that the Department of Justice investigate Planned Parenthood. Both said they found strong evidence that the abortion chain broke the law. The Department of Justice is investigating.
Planned Parenthood repeatedly has denied all allegations of wrong-doing, and many news outlets now parrot its talking points that the undercover videos were deceptively edited or debunked, even though that is not true. An independent forensics investigation verified that the videos were authentic, and witnesses from the abortion industry have been forced to admit under sworn testimony that they were “not altered.”
Some undercover videos show how Planned Parenthood employees callously and flippantly negotiated the price of tiny baby hearts, lungs, livers and brains. Other evidence indicates the abortion giant may have broken HIPAA patient privacy laws.
The expose videos of Planned Parenthood officials allegedly selling the body parts of aborted babies have shocked the nation. Here is a list of all 14:
- In the first video: Dr. Deborah Nucatola of Planned Parenthood commented on baby-crushing: “We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.”
- In the second video: Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Mary Gatter joked, “I want a Lamborghini” as she negotiated the best price for baby parts.
- In the third video: Holly O’Donnell, a former Stem Express employee who worked inside a Planned Parenthood clinic, detailed first-hand the unspeakable atrocities and how she fainted in horror over handling baby legs.
- In the fourth video: Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Savita Ginde stated, “We don’t want to do just a flat-fee (per baby) of like, $200. A per-item thing works a little better, just because we can see how much we can get out of it.” She also laughed while looking at a plate of fetal kidneys that were “good to go.”
- In the fifth video: Melissa Farrell of Planned Parenthood-Gulf Coast in Houston boasted of Planned Parenthood’s skill in obtaining “intact fetal cadavers” and how her “research” department “contributes so much to the bottom line of our organization here, you know we’re one of the largest affiliates, our Research Department is the largest in the United States.”
- In the sixth video: Holly O’Donnell described technicians taking fetal parts without patient consent: “There were times when they would just take what they wanted. And these mothers don’t know. And there’s no way they would know.”
- In the seventh and perhaps most disturbing video: Holly O’Donnell described the harvesting, or “procurement,” of organs from a nearly intact late-term fetus aborted at Planned Parenthood Mar Monte’s Alameda clinic in San Jose, CA. “‘You want to see something kind of cool,’” O’Donnell says her supervisor asked her. “And she just taps the heart, and it starts beating. And I’m sitting here and I’m looking at this fetus, and its heart is beating, and I don’t know what to think.”
- In the eighth video: StemExpress CEO Cate Dyer admits Planned Parenthood sells “a lot of” fully intact aborted babies.
- The ninth video: catches a Planned Parenthood medical director discussing how the abortion company sells fully intact aborted babies — including one who “just fell out” of the womb.
- The 10th video: catches the nation’s biggest abortion business selling specific body parts — including the heart, eyes and “gonads” of unborn babies. The video also shows the shocking ways in which Planned Parenthood officials admit that they are breaking federal law by selling aborted baby body parts for profit.
- Unreleased Videos: Unreleased videos from CMP show Deb Vanderhei of Planned Parenthood caught on tape talking about how Planned Parenthood abortion business affiliates may “want to increase revenue [from selling baby parts] but we can’t stop them…” Another video has a woman talking about the “financial incentives” of selling aborted baby body parts.
- The 11th video: catches a Texas Planned Parenthood abortionist planning to sell the intact heads of aborted babies for research. Amna Dermish is caught on tape describing an illegal partial-birth abortion procedure to terminate living, late-term unborn babies which she hopes will yield intact fetal heads for brain harvesting.
- The 12th video in the series shows new footage of Jennefer Russo, medical director at Planned Parenthood in Orange County, California, describing to undercover investigators how her abortion business tries to harvest intact aborted babies’ bodies for a local for-profit biotech company and changes the abortion procedure to do so.
- The 13th video: exposes a Planned Parenthood medical director admitting that babies born alive after abortion are sometimes killed.
- The 14th video: catches Planned Parenthood executives discussing gruesome abortion procedures and the sale of body parts from aborted babies for profit.
