Cecile Richards did not see the strike coming. The secret plan started two years earlier, in 2013, with a little-known twenty-four-year-old Catholic antiabortion activist, who was driving cross-country with his pet six-foot black-throated monitor lizard named Rocky, and couldn’t stop thinking about Planned Parenthood and what he called “fetal trafficking.” As he made his way to California, his trip became a pilgrimage of sorts, with stops to seek advice and mentorship from some of the antiabortion movement’s more radical outside actors.
In Wichita, Kansas, David Daleiden briefed Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue, on his ideas. He wanted to infiltrate Planned Parenthood and surreptitiously videotape what he believed to be crimes of selling fetal tissue after an abortion. Or, as he often put it, selling “baby body parts.” And then he would expose the women’s health organization to the world.
Newman’s group was known for its aggressive protests of abortion clinics, actions that frequently resulted in arrests and jail time, but even he wasn’t sure this plan would work. Daleiden would have to go deep, create an alternative identity, a fake company, employees, and a website. It would need to be flawless to survive Planned Parenthood’s system of background checks.
In Denton, Texas, Daleiden brainstormed with Mark Crutcher, who had taped similar undercover videos inside Planned Parenthood years earlier. Crutcher became a full-time antiabortion activist the same year his daughter Jackie died hours after she was born. But his videos gained little long-term momentum. Even Republicans seemed not to care, he told Daleiden.
But Daleiden was undeterred. He drafted an eight-page proposal, marked “confidential,” and circulated it to antiabortion donors. Under “GOALS,” he wrote “catch fetal traffickers, especially Planned Parenthood clinics, violating laws, regulations, and common decency.” The estimated cost of his operation: $120,000. He called it “The Human Capital Project.”
Some donors doubted that any new national abortion restrictions could pass, with Obama in the White House and Democrats controlling Congress. “We simply do not believe that the environment is right for anything meaningful to come from this project or most other stings,” Raymond Ruddy, a Catholic philanthropist, emailed Daleiden in 2013, in response to a fundraising request. Daleiden pushed them, fashioning himself as an investigative journalist conducting an undercover sting. He sent over a partial transcript of a secretly recorded conversation with a procurement manager of a fetal tissue company to illustrate the kind of footage his team was capturing.
Daleiden, who joined the antiabortion cause as a teenager after googling images of aborted fetuses, described himself as the child of an unplanned pregnancy. A devout Catholic, he had worked as a researcher for Lila Rose, a young antiabortion activist who pioneered her own undercover video operation that infiltrated Planned Parenthood in 2007. Rose created her videos with James O’Keefe, who went on to start Project Veritas, a conservative group that would spend the next decade using similar misleading tactics and falsified identities to “expose” people he saw as liberal enemies in media and politics. Abortion was O’Keefe’s training ground, an early foreshadowing of how he would later attack Joe Biden, The New York Times, and Pfizer, the manufacturer of one of the leading COVID vaccines.
O’Keefe, Rose, and Daleiden represented a new cadre of antiabortion activists, part of a generation that were children in 1992 when the movement lost Casey—a post-Roe generation. They grew up in the world the first generation of antiabortion activists had created—the children of the religious right—and had only known an America with Roe. They didn’t plan on waiting another four decades for it to end. Raised and catechized almost entirely in the internet era, fluent in Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, they weren’t interested in the incremental approach of the generations of Christian activists that preceded them. Their goal was to set the system on fire. Burn it down and burn it down fast. The more established power brokers of the antiabortion movement needed the younger post-Roe generation to continue the mission they started in the 1970s and 1980s. And over time, Daleiden convinced them to support his project.
The attack landed on YouTube on a Tuesday morning in July 2015, in the form of a professionally dressed woman picking at her salad in an airy Southern California restaurant.
“A lot of people want intact hearts these days,” Dr. Deborah Nucatola, the senior director of medical services for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in the video as she twirled her fork in her lettuce. “Some people want lower extremities, too, which, that’s simple. That’s easy. I don’t know what they’re doing with it, I guess if they want muscle?”
Nucatola chuckled lightly, noting that fetal livers seem to be particularly in demand. Between sips of wine, she described how a doctor could conduct an abortion to preserve the organs of the fetus. “We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact,” she said.
It was a clip Daleiden had worked for years to get. The implication of the footage, however unfair, was unmistakable: Planned Parenthood was a horrifying and criminal organization, whose employees were laughing as they harvested fetal organs for profit. “Hold Planned Parenthood accountable for their illegal sale of baby parts,” flashed the glowing white text as the screen faded to black.
Within hours, the video headlined national news, playing on a loop across cable television. It was bad, Richards’s communications director warned her that morning before she saw the footage. Really bad. To Richards, it felt like a terrorist attack. Reports flooded into Planned Parenthood’s Manhattan headquarters that Daleiden and his team had infiltrated the group’s clinics, laboratories, and conferences. He had even secretly taped a brief conversation with Richards herself. Despite all their power and money, Planned Parenthood had been played.
More videos with even more explosive footage were coming, Daleiden promised. One new video, every week, for months. Richards didn’t know exactly what they had, just that they had hours of it. Her staff lived in a state of fear for months, not knowing whether the next morning would bring another video that would unleash another wave of harassment on their doctors and staff. Her kids worried about her. Friends recommended she start meditating. If the attack was intended to intimidate, it accomplished its mission.
The reality was much more complicated than Daleiden’s video portrayed. Research using tissue from aborted fetuses had been commonplace since the 1960s, funded by the National Institutes of Health for decades and supported by both parties. The tissue offered a uniquely fertile source of the stem cells that generate tissues and organs, providing particularly useful scientific material for advancements in the treatment of eye diseases, diabetes, and muscular dystrophies. Typically, the tissue was collected, with full consent from the women carrying the fetuses, by biological research companies who processed it before selling it to researchers. The practice was legal, as long as no one profited from the tissue itself. And it was rare in the Planned Parenthood network, with only one clinic each in Washington state and California providing tissue from aborted fetuses to researchers.
In the full, nearly three-hour tape Daleiden recorded at their lunch, Nucatola repeatedly tried to explain that Planned Parenthood does not profit when it provides fetal tissue to medical centers, researchers, or the companies that act as middlemen for those institutions. It charged thirty to one hundred dollars, she said, to cover expenses like preservation, transport, or shipping—legally permissible fees for costs. The full explanation of her statements was not included in the nearly nine-minute video that Daleiden released, an editing decision that transformed tonal missteps into the appearance of federal crimes.
Those facts were no match for powerful political backlash that followed almost immediately. Conservative media and Republican lawmakers pounced on the explosive footage, touting the videos as proof of Planned Parenthood’s alleged crimes. “I could talk about the video but I think I’d vomit,” said House Speaker John Boehner. “It’s disgusting.” A House bill that would have raised money for Komen’s breast cancer research—a measure that was expected to easily pass—was pulled from the floor after abortion opponents linked the charity to Planned Parenthood. Four congressional committees soon announced separate investigations into Planned Parenthood, demanding thousands of pages of confidential documents. And Republican governors launched their own investigations against Planned Parenthood’s state affiliates in Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, and Indiana.
Democrats, including allies Richards spent years and tens of millions of dollars cultivating, were largely silent. Even Hillary Clinton, already on the campaign trail for the coming 2016 presidential election and long one of Planned Parenthood’s most stalwart supporters, said nothing about the videos for days.
Yet even as antiabortion movement leaders publicly celebrated, relishing the news that Richards could soon be forced to testify before Congress, it was not widely known just how radical the video sting operation truly was. It was an all-out assault, reliant on a deeply intertwined network of allies, from fringe activists to the highest ranks of the federal government, that few in the mainstream fully understood.
The day after the video landed, a private email chain circulated among top leaders across all sectors of their movement, from Marjorie Dannenfelser to Leonard Leo, one of their movement’s most powerful lawyers, who was connected to seemingly every conservative lawyer, politician, and judge. Some on the chain had only learned of the project just before it went live, and were eager to capitalize on the fresh publicity for their cause. Others had worked for weeks, months, or years to maximize Daleiden’s potential for success.
Autumn Christensen, the staff director of the Pro-Life Caucus in Congress, congratulated Daleiden for “doing a great job of working with folks on the Hill to grease the skids so we could respond appropriately quickly.” Dannenfelser commended the fast political impact. “Just expressing gratitude again. God is good and you guys planned this masterfully,” she said.
“But let’s remember the talking points,” Newman from Operation Rescue reminded the group. “This is about Planned Parenthood. Putting them in jail. Defunding them. Taking down their empire. Blessings and thanks to all.”
FOR THE ANTIABORTION movement, taking down Planned Parenthood was about more than just ending abortion. It was about striking at the biggest symbol of the sexual revolution in America over the past one hundred years, and it required doing things differently to leverage the technological tools of this century. The footage was as evocative as those old photographs of mangled fetuses that activists once carried at their rallies and that John C. Willke put in his early books. But it was supercharged for an online era, able to travel far wider and faster than their posters and pamphlets.
The video was unlike attacks of the 1980s and 1990s, when antiabortion activists posed as patients to get into clinics and chain themselves to operating tables, or firebombed and vandalized clinics, or murdered doctors and clinic staff. This was an online firebombing, a nonviolent action that could be mainstreamed into national politics. And unlike the violence of their past, this action was one that could win support from the most powerful players in the highest ranks of the Republican Party.
It was a new strategy for a new generation of antiabortion activists, digital natives able to harness the power of the internet for maximal impact. The post-Roe generation was pushing their movement into a new era of American politics, adopting more aggressive techniques that were rewarded on social media platforms powered by political polarization. They used the tenets of American democracy to their advantage. Daleiden claimed his operation was undercover journalism, protected by the First Amendment.
But Daleiden built his project on falsehoods. After his road trip with Rocky the lizard, he filed with the IRS to gain tax-exempt status for a nonprofit named the Center for Medical Progress to collect donations. The group qualified under a category for “Diseases, Disorders, Medical Disciplines: Biomedicine, Bioengineering”—not the grouping that applied to antiabortion organizations. Then he made a fake persona, Robert Daoud Sarkis, complete with a falsified driver’s license. After that, a front company, BioMax Procurement Services, described in paperwork filed with the state of California as a corporation that “provides tissue and specimen procurement for academic and private bioscience researchers.” CMP staffers pretended to be officers and employees of BioMax, complete with pseudonyms and credit cards that they used to attend closed conferences held by Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation. They leveraged contacts they made at those events into private meetings at Planned Parenthood affiliates across the country. They filmed for thirty months, wearing police-grade hidden cameras, and taped thousands of hours of footage of doctors, medical assistants, and top staffers.
Daleiden’s project became something much more formidable after his efforts caught the attention of the Alliance Defending Freedom, the hard-charging and well-connected Christian law firm that had supported Lila Rose during her video sting. ADF, which has been called a “religious ministry” by its leadership, was started by a group of men on the religious right in Arizona after Bill Clinton’s 1992 election. Their original mission was to push back against liberal efforts to expand sexual freedoms and “radically reshape America.” Both a law firm and a Christian ministry, ADF aspired to “keep the doors open for the Gospel,” and it often did so by leveraging the First Amendment to roll back laws that expanded rights for abortion and same-sex marriage.
Dannenfelser was on ADF’s board, invited to join for her work against abortion. Unlike Dannenfelser and much of the antiabortion movement, ADF was rooted less in Catholicism and more in conservative evangelical Christianity. Lawyers for the group signed a statement of belief that included principles found on many evangelical church websites, like the primacy of the Bible and Jesus Christ, and agreed to pray and participate in Christian worship services in and outside of work.
ADF had built a practice defending Christians, with a track record of victory at the Supreme Court. The group successfully represented clients fighting against the contraceptive coverage mandated by Obama’s health care law. It got involved in lower-court cases over laws banning what it called “partial birth” abortion and protecting the rights of antiabortion protesters at clinics. The ADF team also won major Supreme Court cases on things that seemed small, like overturning laws to limit the size of church signs, but in doing so established significant constitutional precedent.
The Alliance Defending Freedom specialized in tightly packaged projects. It was not only the legal strategy that mattered but an entire marketing component too. In 2013, the group offered its expertise to Daleiden. A series of documents later revealed in court proceedings gave insight into Daleiden’s plan and the help he received from ADF and the wider universe of antiabortion organizations. Casey Mattox, a lawyer at ADF, flew to California to meet Daleiden “to talk about maximizing the legal impact of the project,” according to an email Daleiden sent to Ruddy, the Catholic donor. Over the next two years, a small fleet of ADF lawyers joined the effort, giving legal advice on recording laws and other matters. Daleiden’s campaign was part of their much larger effort to end abortion and change American culture. And for Daleiden, ADF’s support helped him connect with the broader constellation of antiabortion power.
Americans United for Life, one of the oldest antiabortion policy organizations, became involved in his operation in 2015, according to email logs. Daleiden contacted Kellyanne Conway, too, in May to collect data about how the videos were received, according to court testimony. Both were Catholic, and Daleiden later extolled Conway to the National Catholic Register as an example of what Pope John Paul II called the “feminine genius,” describing her as “indispensable” to his movement. “It’s to their own detriment and, ultimately, defeat, that people underestimate her,” he said.
Daleiden also contacted an even more powerful player: Leonard Leo, the head of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal network, and a passionate opponent of abortion. According to court documents, Leo advised on how to successfully prosecute “the criminal actors” that Daleiden’s video exposed. He connected Daleiden with state and local law enforcement officials in Arizona, Louisiana, Texas, and Michigan, Daleiden said, so that he would not have to “cold call” to share his findings before they were publicly released. Leo said later he never watched the videos, and that he spoke to Daleiden once after they were released to recommend a pro bono lawyer. A close associate of Leo, Greg Mueller, whom Daleiden described as a mentor, helped coordinate media around the release of the videos.
Students for Life, a post–Roe generation group on whose board Leo served, paid Mueller’s bills for Daleiden’s messaging work. The group’s leader, Kristan Hawkins, had trained Rose and other young activists through internships, boot camps, and other programs run by their group on college campuses, where they recruited the new foot soldiers of their movement. Hawkins, who was just four years older than Daleiden, saw abortion as the human rights atrocity of this moment in history and their fight as akin to the civil rights movement. Hawkins opened the Students for Life handbook, a guide for her activists featuring testimonials of “serious abortion abolitionists,” with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. The book—a mission statement of sorts—cast Christians who opposed abortion as heroes in epics of human injustice, comparing the issue to slavery and the Holocaust. “Ask God how he can use you, and I’m sorry if the results are a little radical for you,” she urged young antiabortion activists at a gala in Indiana alongside Governor Mike Pence.
Like Daleiden, Hawkins had been focused on Planned Parenthood. Three years earlier, she hired Conway to learn her supporters’ attitudes toward Planned Parenthood, to better attack the organization on college campuses.
Perhaps most important, Daleiden’s operation built advance support in congressional offices. Before the videos were released, Daleiden and his allies contacted a series of allied elected officials to brief them on their findings. In Oklahoma, Daleiden’s legal advisers corresponded with top lawyers in the attorney general’s offices months before they released anything publicly. In Congress, Daleiden worked directly with Christensen at the Pro-Life Caucus to line up political support. At least two Republican congressmen saw the videos several weeks before they were released, including Representative Trent Franks, who had sponsored the bill for a national twenty-week abortion ban, and Representative Tim Murphy, another outspoken abortion opponent and the chairman of an Energy and Commerce subcommittee that quickly announced an investigation into Planned Parenthood. When Murphy was asked by reporters why he didn’t take action immediately after privately viewing the footage, he stumbled for an answer. “Um, I don’t know why. All I know is I saw it and he said he was going to post it eventually, so that’s all I know,” he said, abruptly ending the conversation. (Murphy resigned from Congress two years later after allegations that he encouraged a woman, with whom he was having an affair, to have an abortion.)
By the project’s launch day, nearly all the most powerful forces in the antiabortion movement were involved somehow with Daleiden’s operation. The upstart plan that seemed crazy just two years earlier was poised to make major gains for their cause.
There was only one thing left to do. Daleiden requested that a priest say a Mass in the old Latin for Nucatola, the Planned Parenthood doctor he secretly recorded, to intercede for her soul to God.