Sunday, Oct. 30, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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Am I going soft?
I am almost starting to feel sorry for David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, the two antiabortion zealots who infiltrated Planned Parenthood in 2014 intending to bring it down for illegally selling aborted baby parts but instead have found themselves facing huge fines and, potentially, prison time.
Using fake identities, fake drivers’ licenses and fake business cards, this pair lied over and over, misrepresenting themselves as officials of an imaginary biomedical company, BioMax Procurement Services, in a failed attempt to entrap Planned Parenthood officials into admitting they traffic in fetal tissue for profit.
As part of their elaborate ruse, Daleiden and Merritt infiltrated meetings of the National Abortion Federation and Planned Parenthood in several states. After months of trying, they inveigled Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s senior director of medical services at the time, into a lunch meeting and secretly recorded her discussing how the organization procures fetal tissue for scientific research and what it charges researchers to cover its costs — not to earn a profit, which Nucatola noted repeatedly.
(By the way, fetal tissue from elective abortions has been used to develop treatments for arthritis, cystic fibrosis and hemophilia. It has been used to develop vaccines to prevent polio, rubella, measles, chicken pox and hepatitis A. Fetal cell lines were used during the research and development of many common medications, including acetaminophen, albuterol, aspirin, ibuprofen, Pepto-Bismol, Lipitor, Ex-Lax, Benadryl and Zoloft.)
As soon as I saw the doctored videos, released in 2015 to whip up hysteria among antiabortion lawmakers and voters, I knew this was just another piece of dishonest theater from people who will stop at nothing to deprive women of the right to control their own bodies.
And whip up hysteria they did: At least 20 states and four congressional committees launched investigations, none of which found anything close to wrongdoing by Planned Parenthood, because, not to put too fine a point on it, there was no “there” there.
These extremists wrongly believed they had staked out some sort of moral high ground that allowed them to break the law in pursuit of health care professionals who provide legitimate and legal health services to a huge swath of Americans.
Then they tried to hide behind the First Amendment, claiming to be legitimate journalists engaged in a legitimate undercover investigation.
Now they have suffered a well-deserved string of legal humiliations.
A Houston grand jury, convened nearly seven years ago, found no wrongdoing by the health care provider and instead handed down criminal indictments against Daleiden and Merritt.
Oh, snap!
Those charges were eventually dropped, sadly, but Daleiden et al have a heap of other legal woes.
In 2016, Planned Parenthood filed a federal civil lawsuit in San Francisco, alleging that Daleiden and Merritt, along with others who were part of their scheme, had engaged in an illegal conspiracy to block access to abortion. A jury sided with Planned Parenthood, finding that Daleiden and Merritt had broken the law and would have to pay Planned Parenthood damages in excess of $2.4 million.
The defendants appealed, and last week, they lost again when a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld most of the jury’s damages against the pair.
“From the beginning of their scheme,” wrote Judge Ronald Gould, “Appellants engaged in illegal conduct — including forging signatures, creating and procuring fake driver’s licenses, and breaching contracts — that the jury found so objectionable as to award Planned Parenthood punitive damages.”
No journalist, said the court, gets a free pass to break the law in pursuit of a story.
“The First Amendment is not a license to trespass, to steal, or to intrude by electronic means into the precincts of another’s home or office,” the court said.
While the federal civil case was wending its way through the system, the state of California charged the pair with more than a dozen criminal counts. In 2017, then-California Attorney General Xavier Becerra alleged that the antiabortion duo had committed felony violations of a state law that prohibits recording conversations without consent. They have pleaded not guilty.
On Monday, a spokesperson for current state Attorney General Rob Bonta told me the case is still pending. On Sept. 26, a court denied a defense motion to have the case dismissed. The next hearing is scheduled for Nov. 3, at which time a trial date may be assigned.
Tragically, the U.S. Supreme Court has done legally what this pair tried to do illicitly. With the overturning of Roe vs. Wade in June, the court, which defended the right to end a pregnancy for nearly half a century, has now allowed states to severely curtail or completely outlaw abortion. About half have done so.
Fortunately, many states will never capitulate to the attempt to turn back the clock on the progress and bodily autonomy of American women.
I doubt antiabortion activists will go away anytime soon. But maybe the legal woes of Daleiden et al will have a chilling effect on their misguided crusades.
Robin Abcarian is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
