All summer, David Daleiden’s videos kept coming. In late July, footage showed Dr. Savita Ginde, vice president and medical director of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, poking at bloody bits in what looked like a Pyrex dish. She narrated what she saw: “Here’s some stomach, a heart, kidney, and adrenal. I don’t know what else is in there. Arms?”
“Another boy!” exclaimed her medical assistant as the ominous music rose and the video cut to black.
Planned Parenthood struggled to convince even some of its own donors that it had, as Cecile Richards saw it, been scammed. Its “fight back” effort, as the group called it, was extensive. It bolstered security to protect the staff and doctors in the videos and protect against increasing threats of cyberattacks. It hired Anita Dunn, a former adviser to Obama and Biden, to help with crisis communications, targeted key senators with an ad campaign, and brought on white-shoe lawyers to defend them in the state and congressional investigations. None of that came cheap; the lawyers alone cost nearly $3 million. The campaign quickly blew through the group’s lobbying budget, prompting an emergency appeal for another $1.5 million from the Soros Foundation, a civic society organization founded by one of the country’s biggest Democratic donors.
Eventually, Planned Parenthood brought on its own investigator—Fusion GPS—to examine the veracity of the videos. The forensic analysis concluded that the videos had been edited in ways it deemed misleading, but it found no evidence that the antiabortion group made up dialogue. David Daleiden attributed the gaps to “bathroom breaks” and “waiting periods between meetings.”
But there were other manipulations too. A shot of a fetus included in one of the videos with the implication that it was aborted was later found to be an image of a child born at nineteen weeks, whose mother took the photo two years earlier to memorialize her son. The cuts and edits, investigators concluded, meant the videos had “no evidentiary value in a legal context and cannot be relied upon for any official inquiries.” The footage was real but the packaging of the videos didn’t tell an accurate story. The framing created by Daleiden and his allies across the antiabortion movement gave the false impression that Planned Parenthood was breaking the law.
As the congressional investigations proceeded, Richards spent weeks preparing to testify, poring over thousands of pages of documents with her lawyers. When the big day arrived, she wrapped herself in her mother’s legacy. She put on her dark blue suit and stuck on her lapel the gold pin of Ann’s that always reminded her of a sheriff’s badge—the one she wore when doing hard things. Taped inside the cover of the thick binder of research assembled by her team was another talisman of support, a photo of her three kids when they were toddlers. As she walked into the room, Richards checked her phone one last time. There was a final blessing from a friend: “May the rage of women through the centuries center you as you go into this,” texted Terry McGovern, an expert in women’s health at Columbia University.
The support of antiabortion leaders had given Daleiden’s guerrilla tactics greater impact. But in Congress, they had to cede control to their Republican allies. And despite all of Marjorie Dannenfelser’s trainings, the party squandered the opportunity that the antiabortion movement had worked so hard to create. In the early moments of the hearing, Representative Jason Chaffetz, the chairman of the committee, made clear that he planned to focus on Planned Parenthood’s finances, rather than the morality of the procedure itself. His first line of attack was over Richards’s salary, and he fumbled, overstating it by $70,000. She corrected him: “I think we’ve been extremely forthcoming with all of our documents.”
When Chaffetz flashed a chart that he claimed was based on Planned Parenthood data, Richards called him on the mistake, pointing out that the information was pulled from Americans United for Life, the antiabortion group. “I would check your source,” she said. Chaffetz appeared deflated: “Then we will get to the bottom of the truth of that,” he said.
When other Republicans attempted to compare Richards to a criminal, she “respectfully” disagreed. And when they interrupted her responses, again and again, she calmly asked for a chance to answer the question, leaving the complaints of misogyny to her Democratic allies on the committee. “I’m not clear on this: Do you defend the sale of baby body parts?” asked John Duncan of Tennessee, after suggesting Planned Parenthood was taking federal funds that could have gone to Boys and Girls Clubs. “No, and I think that is really a total mischaracterization,” Richards replied in a tone that reflected the fatigue of hours of polite endurance.
It was a performance so skillful that even some conservatives couldn’t help but offer damning praise of Richards’s handling of the more than four and a half hours of questioning. “Masterful evasiveness,” Kristan Hawkins, of Students for Life, told reporters. As for the Republicans, “there’s always room for improvement,” Daleiden said.
Hillary Clinton called that evening to congratulate Richards. Once Clinton spoke out, about two weeks after the first video, she never wavered in her support for Planned Parenthood. She called the tapes “disturbing,” but she also added a new line to her campaign stump speech. “I will defend Planned Parenthood,” she told voters in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Clinton watched Richards’s testimony as she herself prepared to testify before a House committee a few weeks later about the 2012 attack on a US diplomatic outpost and CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya. “You were wonderful,” she told Richards. “I’m going to be up there myself soon. Good for you for standing up to them.”
Clinton knew who they were fighting. She remembered being personally attacked by the local conservative Christian groups in Arkansas in the 1980s, and fighting the religious right in Washington in the 1990s. “I don’t know how best to convey the really extraordinary hostility that I personally experienced being pro-choice in certain political settings,” she reflected later. “And I just saw how determined they were.”
The weeks of controversy over the videos appeared to have little impact on public opinion. Planned Parenthood was still viewed more favorably than not by most Americans. A Wall Street Journal / NBC poll released the day before Richards’s testimony found that the organization was viewed positively by 47 percent of people, a percentage largely unchanged from the 45 percent who said the same in July.
After years of litigation and millions of dollars in legal fees, Planned Parenthood was cleared of the cloud of wrongdoing. Two weeks after Mike Pence launched an investigation in Indiana, his state department of health cleared its state Planned Parenthood affiliates. The investigations in nineteen other states and in Congress failed to find significant evidence that Planned Parenthood profited off fetal tissue. The efforts of House Republicans to defund the organization stalled in the Senate, making it no further to becoming law. In 2016, agents dispatched by Kamala Harris, then the California attorney general, searched Daleiden’s apartment, confiscating his computers and hard drives. Years later, the courts would find that Daleiden had broken the law, holding him and the Center for Medical Progress liable for more than $2 million in damages.
In the end, Planned Parenthood was vindicated. The assaults did not come from true concerns over the work of her organization, Richards concluded. They came from people “who resent that women actually have the legal right to make their own decisions about their pregnancies,” she told the magazine American Prospect a few months after she testified. “That’s what they’re mad about, and they’re really mad.”
Once again, the country faced a crossroads over abortion rights, and Richards believed that the future would favor her side, the side of Roe. “I believe this country is not going to go backwards,” she said.
Yet the videos also made clear that Planned Parenthood’s opposition had entered a new, more aggressive phase. A fringe of the antiabortion movement was interwoven with the mainstream. Though the sting was nonviolent, the unfounded accusations of criminal activity were repeated by more radicalized opponents. In November, a mass shooting occurred at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. Three people were killed, and nine others were wounded. In a rambling interview after his arrest, the shooter said the phrase “no more baby parts.”
The video campaign proved effective where it needed to be. The antiabortion movement was now powerful enough to convince conservative Tea Party lawmakers in the House to threaten to force a government shutdown unless Congress defunded Planned Parenthood, effectively holding the government hostage over abortion—one unpopular position building to another even more unpopular stance. That effort even led to the ousting of House Speaker John Boehner, the devout Catholic congressman from southern Ohio. For years, he was seen as the strongest antiabortion lawmaker ever to hold the speaker’s gavel. But now, even he couldn’t compete with this new class of more radical social conservatives who would accept no compromise on the issue. It was a sign of how the antiabortion movement had regained its national political grip. Its agenda could force the resignation of the second in line to the presidency.
Daleiden also saw another win. His videos focused on abortions in the second trimester. Up to that point, much of the public focus had been on abortion later in pregnancy. With the controversy started by his footage, antiabortion activists were shifting the country’s attention to fetuses prior to viability. “It was progress,” he said.
The antiabortion movement had come so far from just three years earlier, when the autopsy called for their expulsion from the Republican Party. When Republicans passed yet another bill to repeal Obama’s health care law, they added a measure to defund Planned Parenthood. It never became law, of course: Obama vetoed the legislation and Republicans lacked the votes to override the president. But the fact that the bill passed Congress was a sign that the antiabortion movement had gained traction, and just in time for a coming critical juncture. Only the president now stood between them and their goal. And the Republican field looked more promising to them than it had in years.
Weeks after the videos dropped, Dannenfelser sat in the audience of the very first prime-time Republican primary debate and watched as the candidates practically tripped over one another to be the strongest ally of her movement. Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, argued for giving a zygote, from conception, rights as a full person under the Fourteenth Amendment. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker said he wanted a complete ban on abortion even in cases of rape, incest, or to save the woman’s life, a position he said was “in line with everyday America,” even as the Fox News debate hosts pushed back that the majority of Americans did not agree. And minutes after Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, touted his “completely pro-life” record, his home state senator Marco Rubio outdid him, saying that “future generations will look back at this history of our country and call us barbarians for murdering millions of babies who we never gave them a chance to live.” Only one man on stage, a political novice named Donald Trump, was an outlier, offering what Dannenfelser and her allies saw as an inadequate answer, particularly when compared to his rivals.
The antiabortion movement may have lost the fight to defund Planned Parenthood, but it had powerfully advanced its cause. “We may be at a political crossroads where the right has a resurgence,” warned Ellen Chesler, a former Planned Parenthood board member and Sanger biographer, in an interview with The New York Times. “The politics is so totally unpredictable and unknowable.”