Grandmas in chains: Harris legacy of pursuing pro-life activists set stage for wider legal fight

Defending the abortion industry helped define Vice President Kamala Harris as California attorney general, especially a controversial 2016 raid on pro-life activist David Daleiden to seize and suppress undercover videos of Planned Parenthood officials who thought they were talking to "laboratory wholesalers" in Daleiden's sting.

Some of those videos, released years later at a congressional proceeding, show Planned Parenthood tried to preserve fetal tissue to sell for research and avoid prosecution by detaching extremities.

Her successor as California attorney general, Xavier Becerra took the baton when Harris joined the U.S. Senate, bringing 15 criminal charges against 35-year-old Daleiden and grandmother Sandra Merritt for "the criminal recording of confidential conversations." A San Francisco jury found them guilty in 2019. Becerra is now the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary.

Planned Parenthood separately sued Daleiden and his Center for Medical Progress and was awarded $2 million.

Now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Harris is campaigning hard on reproductive rights — a frequent subject of her ads, some of which imply that mainstream media endorse her narratives.

But the legacy of lawfare and prosecution she unleashed may boomerang on a future Harris presidential administration as pro-life activists use the First Amendment to wage a legal counteroffensive that is pushing toward the Supreme Court.

While the Supreme Court struck down California's 2015 law coercing pro-life pregnancy centers to promote abortion in 2018, pro-life activists urged the high court last month to overrule its "zombie precedent" Hill v. Colorado, still cited by lower courts to uphold "buffer zone" laws that critics argue flout the First Amendment rights of pro-life advocates near abortion clinics.

Scrutiny is building on the Harris-Becerra prosecution due to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., posting Daleiden's full undercover videos this month as an addendum to her March event with Daleiden and Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising founder Terrisa Bukovinac, who challenged President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination a year ago.

Biden's Justice Department prosecuted pro-life activists including PAAU members under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act for a D.C. abortion clinic sit-in that took place before Biden took office. Seven were sentenced to years in prison, three of them elderly.

Bukovinac was in Detroit Wednesday for another FACE Act jury trial with 89-year-old defendant Eva Edl, a "Yugoslavian death camp survivor," who faces charges for a Michigan abortion clinic sit-in with six others. 

TODAY: a jury in Detroit Michigan heard arguments from the federal government that 89!!!-year-old Eva Edl violated the FACE Act when she and 6 others peacefully blocked the doors of one of the most notorious abortion mills in Michigan-Northland Family Planning in Sterling… pic.twitter.com/BP6fzv7S2L

— Terrisa Bukovinac (@Terrisalin) August 14, 2024

Grandmother Heather Idoni, who "has already been tried and convicted in both DC and [Tennessee] FACE trials and was led into court [in] chains," is representing herself in the Michigan case, according to Bukovinac.

Daleiden's Center for Medical Progress has been on a spree of posting its undercover videos since a court in May ruled that CMP couldn't be blocked from republishing footage obtained through congressional subpoenas. 

Last week, it showed Planned Parenthood officials in Houston describing how they work meticulously to remove aborted fetuses intact while avoiding techniques that would violate the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act . One joked that "if other people were to hear me" talking about selling a fetus's leg, "they’d be like, you are f***ing evil."

CMP also posted emails unsealed in court that followed those surreptitiously recorded meetings. Its fictitious Biomax sent a "procurement and compensation" contract for fetal liver and thymus to Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, and its officials agreed internally to "move forward with this."

A few weeks after this conversation, in June 2015, CMP emailed Nguyen and Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast VP of Research Melissa Farrell an undercover contract for $750 per fetal liver and $1,600 per pair of fetal liver and thymus. In unsealed emails produced in federal court, Nguyen forwarded the contract to PPGC’s Regional Medical & Surgical Services Director, Dyann Santos, writing, “FYI—we’re still trying to move forward with this,” to which Santos asked, “Do you want to do this?” and to which Nguyen replied, “Yes ma’am.”

Planned Parenthood, which reported $2.05 billion in revenue in its most recent annual report, has long denied any wrongdoing and insisted it has been a victim of Daleiden's work. Activists "broke the law in a multi-year campaign to advance their anti-abortion agenda and prevent Planned Parenthood from serving the patients who depend on us," Planned Parenthood has said.

Daleiden also provided first-person video of the Harris raid this month to The Daily Signal, which said it had newly reviewed the documentation cited in Daleiden's 2020 lawsuit against Harris. 

NEW: I've reviewed emails showing that then California Attorney General Kamala Harris had a much anticipated meeting with top Planned Parenthood officials in March 2016.

Two weeks later, her state DOJ agents raided pro-life journalist David Daleiden's home — looking for the… pic.twitter.com/IPG2qXE4N2

— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) August 7, 2024

He alleged that Harris secretly met with PP officials two weeks before the raid, and that her office arranged an interview months earlier between agents and a PP lawyer, who demanded the seizure of Daleiden's computers. 

Merritt's lawyers at Liberty Counsel asked the California Supreme Court to overturn her conviction this spring based on a three-judge 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel overturning Oregon's "substantially similar recording law" as a First Amendment violation, though the full 9th Circuit overturned it shortly after Merritt's lawyers filed. 

An 11-judge 9th Circuit panel heard arguments in June on whether the Oregon law's requirement to inform "all participants" being recorded "triggers First Amendment scrutiny" and its exceptions constitute content-based speech regulations, which would impose strict scrutiny, the highest judicial bar to clear. It has not ruled yet.

Two groups of pro-life pregnancy centers went before the same judge in Buffalo federal court Thursday to block New York AG Letitia James from censoring their promotion of so-called abortion pill reversal — taking supplemental progesterone to neutralize mifepristone. Yale School of Medicine's reproductive research director has said the protocol makes "biological sense."

They are represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, which filed suit and sought a preliminary injunction in May, and Thomas More Society, which sued last week and sought a preliminary injunction and consolidation with ADF's case this week.

A spokesperson for the Thomas More Society told Just the News there was no "major court action or decision" at the hearing, which was not livestreamed.

"Today’s hearing made it clear that this case is about one thing: whether the government can keep pregnancy centers from informing women about potentially life-saving care," ADF senior counsel Caleb Dalton said when asked for his perspective on how it went.

"The government’s censorship is pushing a pro-abortion agenda at the expense of women who may regret, or have been forced into, a chemical abortion," he wrote in an email. "It is forcing women to go through with an abortion that they don’t want."

The Democrat-run Colorado Legislature stopped threatening to censor visitors to the Capitol building after the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression threatened to sue over the eviction of Jeff Hunt for "silently" wearing prohibited "political apparel" — a pro-life sweatshirt — during floor debate on legislation against pro-life pregnancy centers, FIRE said Wednesday.

Security officials did not evict students wearing anti-gun shirts in the Capitol weeks earlier on a specifically chosen day to lobby lawmakers for new gun laws. They belatedly claimed the ban on political apparel does not apply when lawmakers are not debating the subject on the apparel. 

A FIRE spokesperson showed Just the News the letter it received from Office of Legislative Legal Services Director Ed DeCecco.

It says Senate President Steve Fenberg and House Speaker Julie McCluskie "have revoked the rule banning 'pins and apparel expressing political statements' in the House and Senate galleries, and, therefore, the sergeants-at-arms will no longer enforce this rule." 

The prohibition was gone from the gallery rules page as of Tuesday and "has been removed or redacted from the signs outside of the galleries," DeCecco said, while emphasizing the leaders "reserve the right to create and enforce" other rules for apparel or pins and their decision "is not binding" on their successors.