Case filed by Planned Parenthood
NEW YORK: Planned Parenthood mounted a legal counterattack on Thursday against the anti-abortion activists who used covertly taped videos to accuse the organisation of trading in aborted baby parts, charging in a federal lawsuit that “anti-abortion extremists” had engaged in a three-year “complex criminal enterprise”.
The lawsuit, filed in US District Court in San Francisco, was brought by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and its seven California affiliates. The named defendants include the Center for Medical Progress (the anti-abortion group that made and released the videotapes); its director, David Daleiden, who appeared under an alias in many of the videos; Troy Newman, the head of Operation Rescue, who is accused of helping to plan the elaborate deception; and others who played roles in a sham medical company.
“The people behind this fraud lied and broke the law in order to spread malicious lies about Planned Parenthood,” Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a written statement. “We filed the case to hold them accountable.”
The videotapes created an uproar last summer when the Centre for Medical Progress, a previously little-known group, began releasing them. In the first of them, a senior Planned Parenthood medical official is shown discussing over lunch, in casual terms that many found shocking, the provision of fetal tissue to what she believed was a medical company, but was actually a fake enterprise.
The activists claimed that this tape, and several others including discussions inside medical facilities, revealed that Planned Parenthood was engaged in the illegal sale of body parts — a charge the organisation firmly denied and that has not been supported in numerous congressional and state investigations that were triggered by release of the videos.
Planned Parenthood apologised for the tone of the doctor’s comments in that initial tape, but said that it and others were edited in a misleading manner. It said that a handful of its centres across the country had engaged in the legal transfer of fetal tissue, with permission of the women involved, for medical research.
But the videotapes and the allegations of illegal activity gave a powerful new force to the campaign to deny public funds to Planned Parenthood and led to increased vandalism, harassment and threats of violence against its clinics. The gunman in Colorado Springs who killed three and injured nine at a health centre in November reportedly said “no more baby parts” to investigators, an apparent reference to the allegations.
In a written statement on Thursday, the Centre for Medical Progress called the lawsuit “frivolous” and accused Planned Parenthood of filing it “in retaliation for CMP’s First Amendment investigative journalism that has done nothing more than tell the truth about Planned Parenthood’s lawless operations”.
The 65-page suit states that the defendants set up a fake company and claimed to be part of a legitimate provider of fetal tissue to researchers.