Anti-abortion activist reignites issue with hidden camera

Washington — David Daleiden would only reluctantly talk about himself: “I don’t think I’m the story,” he said by phone on Tuesday. But he is the man behind the story and the hidden camera — the anti-abortion activist who has provoked a storm with his video stings alleging that Planned Parenthood clinics are selling tissue from aborted fetuses for profit, a charge the group denies.

On Tuesday, for a second time in two weeks, a video appeared online showing a Planned Parenthood official in California discussing over lunch the price of providing fetal parts to a man and woman who are never shown on camera, but who are posing as buyers from a firm that procures tissue for medical researchers. Once again, Planned Parenthood condemned the scam for deceptively characterizing its handling fees to cover expenses, which are legal, as illegal profiteering.

The man off camera, just as in first video, is Daleiden. And, he said in the interview, more episodes are coming. Planned Parenthood’s recent prediction that he must have “thousands of hours of videotape” from infiltrating its clinics for 2½ years is “probably an accurate estimate,” Daleiden, 26, said. He guessed he had enough recordings for perhaps a dozen videos that he can release at the rate of one a week for the next few months.

The time frame all but assures political tumult ahead. The videos will coincide with the Republican- controlled Congress’ final weeks of work on spending bills needed to finance the government after the Oct. 1 start of the next fiscal year. The first videos already have given impetus to conservatives’ push to hold those bills hostage unless they are amended to eliminate money for Planned Parenthood and other family-planning programs. The risk, as in past years, is a government shutdown.

The videos are also arriving as the large field of Republicans seeking their party’s 2016 presidential nomination takes final shape, and their televised debates begin next month. Already, the rivals are competing to denounce Planned Parenthood as they seek to appeal to anti-abortion conservatives in the party’s base.

“I’m going to do everything I can to stop it,” Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky vowed on Fox News. “We should stop all funding for Planned Parenthood.”

One House committee supported by Speaker John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, has opened an investigation of the alleged criminal trafficking in fetal tissue, and the Republican leaders from two other committees have written to the Justice Department asking for investigations as well. Seven states are pressing their own inquiries, including two investigations ordered by Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, both Republican presidential candidates.

The White House and congressional Democrats, who are allies of Planned Parenthood and protective of women’s abortion and reproductive rights, have been mostly silent. They say Planned Parenthood has done a good job in its own defense, and that they do not want to give the story any more oxygen than it already has— especially since some video stings of the past came to be discredited without Democrats’ help.

Also, Democrats said they are counting on Republicans to overreach with their attacks— inciting a backlash from women, younger voters and political independents who support Planned Parenthood, and then retreating, as has happened before.

“By Boehner and the Republicans leaping into the middle of this, I think they further demonstrate the political nature of the attack,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster. “And as someone who’s done a lot of polling about Planned Parenthood, I feel reasonably confident that Americans, particularly American women, will see this as about politics, not about health care.”

But Daleiden expresses confidence that this time is different, and that his videos will change minds.

He wanted to start releasing them a year ago but said he needed to get more material against what he called “the whole world of selling baby parts.”