Five years ago, the pro-life community watched in horror as one of their own became the first-ever undercover journalist in California history to be prosecuted for secretly recording criminal activity. David Daleiden from the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) went undercover for 30 months in the abortion industry, and what he found — barefaced evidence of Planned Parenthood blithely selling sections of human corpses, for example — rattled the nation.
What many in Oregon may not realize or remember is that Daleiden’s case is directly connected to our state, as Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) was one of the buyers of aborted victims’ body parts.
OHSU has not yet been held accountable and may still be purchasing aborted fetal tissue.
Agents for then-California attorney general Kamala Harris raided Daleiden’s apartment in 2016. She eventually brought criminal charges that could result in a decade of prison for the journalist. Harris’s actions were clearly not impartial. Email records show extensive communication between her office and Planned Parenthood officials discussing a coordinated gloss-over campaign plus a fierce legal attack against Daleiden. Meanwhile, Harris has accepted thousands of dollars of campaign contributions directly from the abortion giant.
Daleiden’s case remains ongoing. U.S. District Judge William Orrick ruled in August that nine of the original charges still stand. At press time, Orrick also ruled that Planned Parenthood could seize Daleiden’s and CMP’s assets if they failed to post $600,000 in appeal bond. This latest ruling came after a civil trial last autumn found CMP responsible for $2.3 million in damages.
In 2018, prompted by Daleiden’s work, Oregon Right to Life (ORTL) concluded a two-year investigation into OHSU and its business deals with fetal-tissue middlemen. They found clear evidence, including OHSU’s own admission, that the university was purchasing organs such as livers and thymuses and implanting them into mice.
Currently, OHSU has not yet been held accountable and may still be purchasing aborted fetal tissue for research.“What we discovered over a two-year period of inquiries into the research conducted at OHSU is that the traffic in aborted baby parts is protected by powerful interests,” says Lois Anderson, ORTL executive director. “David is fearless and determined, at great personal cost, to put a stop to it.”
