CA Ends Prosecution Of Pro-Lifers Who Found Aborted Baby Sales

After nearly a decade of purely political prosecution, California has agreed to a plea deal that ends its case against investigative journalists David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, who exposed Planned Parenthood’s lucrative sales of aborted baby body parts for scientific experiments.  

Daleiden, founder of the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), and Merritt were co-defendants in the case first brought in 2016 by then California Attorney General Kamala Harris at the behest of Planned Parenthood, a mega-donor to her political campaigns.

As The Federalist’s Managing Editor Madeline Osburn previously reported, between 2010-2015, Planned Parenthood, its board members, and other abortion groups donated more than $81,000 to Harris’s political campaigns. When she was running for Senate in 2016, Harris’s campaign website featured a petition asking visitors to sign in support of preventing Planned Parenthood from being defunded.

During preliminary hearings for this case, it was revealed that Harris met with six executives of Planned Parenthood who were later used as witnesses in Harris’ criminal investigation of Daleiden and Merrit, Osburn reported: “Two weeks after that Los Angeles meeting, Harris ordered a search warrant specifically seeking Daleiden’s unreleased videos and documents, which should have been protected by the California shield law protecting citizen journalists’ unpublished materials.”

Harris charged them with violating California’s recording law, kicking off nine years of court expenses, political persecution, and all the anguish that goes with it. But the videos Planned Parenthood desperately tried to use government allies to hide were eventually made public.

In a gut-wrenching sales pitch recorded by Daleiden in a 2015 undercover video, Planned Parenthood staff flippantly explain how they partially extract babies from their mothers’ bodies during the second trimester, and sometimes “pull off a leg, or two,” being careful not to damage the human organs for sale, as Federalist writer Jordan Boyd reported in August.

Merritt was involved in the production of the video.

“Before this unprecedented case, the State of California had never criminally prosecuted undercover journalists for surreptitious recordings made in the public interest,” a statement from Liberty Counsel said. “Yet, this courageous grandmother was charged with 16 felonies and faced more than 10 years in prison for shining a light on the abortion industry’s profit from illegal organ harvesting from aborted babies.”

The case highlighted Harris’ disregard for the First Amendment, Osburn wrote: “California’s video recording law does not prohibit anybody from recording conversations in a public area that anybody can oversee. The law also explicitly permits recording, even a private conversation, if it is being done in order to gather evidence of a violent crime. And yet, Daleiden was the first and only case in California in which a journalist has ever been charged with violating the state’s video recording law.”

Although the case is finally done, it is still being used to advance extremist abortion politics. California Attorney General Rob Bonta is using the case as a warning to pro-lifers and he continues to damage the reputations of the two in a mischaracterized press release Tuesday titled, “Attorney General Bonta Secures Felony Conviction of David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt for Criminal Invasion of Privacy.”

Bonta repeats the claim that Daleiden was “convicted of felony invasion of privacy,” in a social media post on X.

Daleiden posted court papers showing Bonta has it wrong. The pair will not be found guilty of a felony unless they fail to meet the terms of the plea agreement. Bonta mentions the terms in his statement, but holds they are already convicted of a felony.

According to Bonta’s statement, the terms of the plea agreement include:

• Daleiden and Merritt will have no contact with, stay away from, and not name the victims — whether in public, their private residences, over social media, or at their work locations.
• Daleiden and Merritt must obey all laws. This specifically includes not making any additional recordings that violate Penal Code Section 632.

While Bonta made the deal sound like a win for the state, the two, who faced years in prison, agreed to a “no contest” plea for one charge of “unlawful recording of confidential communication” in exchange for no prison.  

Bonta’s statement said the two were charged for “criminally recording confidential communications with women’s healthcare providers,” that is, abortionists.

“While the Trump Administration is issuing pardons to individuals convicted of harming reproductive health clinics and providers, my office is securing criminal convictions to ensure that Californians can exercise their constitutional rights to reproductive healthcare,” Bonta’s statement said. “We will not hesitate to continue taking action against those who threaten access to abortion care — whether by recording confidential conversations or other means.”

Daleiden released the following statement on X.

“CMP’s undercover reporting at issue in this case led to a $7.8 million settlement in which two companies admitted illegally selling aborted fetuses from Planned Parenthood in southern California, a settlement with disgorgement of profits from the sale of aborted fetal organs in Arizona, and the disqualification of Planned Parenthood from state and federal funding in Texas for violations of medical standards and ethics documented in the undercover footage — where Planned Parenthood now faces a nearly $2 billion federal False Claims Act case from the disqualification,” Daleiden wrote.

Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.