A year ago today, working with terrorists of the anti-abortion movement, David Daleiden distributed the first of four “sting” videos to conservative politicians and some media purporting to show that Planned Parenthood offices were profiting from the sale of tissue from aborted fetuses. As we learned soon afterward, the videos constituted an unfounded smear against the organization, fabricated by extremists with sleight-of-hand editing.
This caustic fakery was the sole project of an organization founded by Daleiden called the Center for Medical Progress (CMP)—which has zero to do with medicine or progress—and a non-existent organization, Biomax Procurement Services, which was used to set up and secretly tape interviews under false pretenses with Planned Parenthood officials.
Besides Daleiden, CMP’s principals are Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue, which ran a long attack campaign on Kansas Dr. George Tiller, who was assassinated by an anti-abortion terrorist in 2009, and Operation Rescue’s senior adviser Cheryl Sullenger, who served two years for conspiring to bomb an abortion clinic in 1988. When Tiller’s assassin, Scott Roeder, was arrested, police found Sullenger’s phone number on the dashboard of his car.
The outrage that ensued last July over the video among anti-abortion politicians—and, briefly, even among some liberals who should have known better—drew widespread media coverage and kindled investigations and other actions in 24 states and by five congressional committees, including a select committee specifically formed to dig into Planned Parenthood.
It seemed for a while as if Daleiden and his pals had dealt a crippling blow to Planned Parenthood. The Senate tried to cut off funding to the organization and several states actually did so, directly or indirectly. There was gleeful talk among right-wingers of criminal charges being initiated against Planned Parenthood for selling fetal tissue.
But today, a year after the video was released—and a century after Planned Parenthood began its life under another name—the organization is stronger than before.
It has gained more public favorability, the video has been exposed as a sham extensively edited into a pack of lies, defunding by New Hampshire has been reversed, Planned Parenthood has sued CMP for alleged wire and mail fraud (by allegedly violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) in an illegal conspiracy to block women's access to safe and legal abortion), and 15 other lawsuits against states that have cut off Planned Parenthood funding or threatened to do so.