19 March 2014 Congressional Hearing, “Investigating the Black Market of Baby Organ Harvesting”
Opening Statement from Witness David Daleiden
Madame Chair, representatives, thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today.
My name is David Daleiden. I’m the founder and president of The Center for Medical Progress, a nonprofit investigative journalism organization that focuses on bioethical issues that impact human dignity, with a special focus on the trafficking and harvesting of aborted babies for experimentation.
I want to acknowledge that some of the many people viewing this hearing may have had a personal experience with abortion. And to express my concern that the taxpayer-funded abortion industry should never be in a position to exploit the circumstances that may have led you to have that experience. And also to note that what we will discuss today may be graphic.
My organization is responsible for the series of undercover video reports in 2015 that caught Planned Parenthood’s top-level leadership callously negotiating the harvesting and sale of aborted baby body parts. [I’d like to play some of that footage now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2T5jD5Qytw]
My undercover work in the abortion industry and subsequent investigative reporting has shown me a very dark and broken side of humanity. I’ve watched the handling of dismembered babies inside some of the biggest Planned Parenthood abortion centers in the country, while their “research” officials discussed how to disguise the sales. I’ve met with dozens of Planned Parenthood’s top abortion providers at their lavish commercial abortion trade shows—sponsored by companies buying baby parts. At these trade shows, I consumed far more alcoholic beverages with abortion providers than my liver would like to admit, as they talked about the harvesting and sale of aborted baby livers. Sometimes, I actually saw them start to tear up describing the tiny brains and hearts and feet of premature babies that they dismember and brutalize before selling them, only to then steel themselves and shake it off, as they tried to suppress the heresy of human feelings that the dogma of industrial-scale abortion cannot allow.
I’ll never forget when early on in my research, a whistleblower from fetal body parts company StemExpress, told me about the biggest liver her lab had ever sold—from a baby aborted at 5 months at the Planned Parenthood in Sacramento, CA. They took the stem cells from the liver, put them in a vial, and sold them for $17,000 to another taxpayer-funded laboratory. Planned Parenthood says 75% of abortions take place because of financial problems. $17,000 might have been somebody’s rent money for the next year. But for the abortion clinics selling and the government-funded laboratories buying, that 5-month-old baby was worth more dead than alive.
I’ve also witnessed the apparent apathy of too many public officials in the face of such barbarism. It led one of my undercover investigators to remark in exasperation, “If we asked StemExpress to ship a baby’s head to the sheriff’s doorstep, would they care more then?”
That was an ethical line I did not feel like we could cross. I wish the taxpayer-funded clinics and laboratories involved shared the same views. Recent government-sponsored experiments on aborted baby parts involve stitching the scalps of 5-month-old aborted babies onto lab rats, to keep the baby hair growing on the rodents. This was done at the University of Pittsburgh to develop a new experimental platform to sell to Big Pharma.
FOIA documents we recently reported on show the fetal tissue bank at Pitt is under federal law enforcement investigation by the HHS-Office of Inspector General. But since Congress requested this investigation 3 years ago, there has been no update from the OIG.
But our investigative reporting is ongoing. Two weeks ago, we broke the story about a contract Planned Parenthood has with the University of California, where Planned Parenthood and UC San Diego agree for Planned Parenthood to sell its “proprietary” aborted fetuses in exchange for the “valuable consideration” of ownership of the patents and intellectual property the university develops using them, which could be worth millions of dollars in ongoing royalties.
The transfer of any aborted fetal tissue for “valuable consideration” is a federal felony. But describing aborted babies as “proprietary” means Planned Parenthood thinks they own them and have a right to sell them. Whatever the total amount of the sales, this contract is irrefutable proof of Planned Parenthood’s criminal mens rea to sell aborted baby body parts in violation of federal law.
The abortion industry, led by Planned Parenthood, is a powerful special interest in our country. They fight to silence reporting on their black market of aborted baby organ harvesting, and the ongoing cover up goes to the highest levels of our government. Kamala Harris, as the Planned Parenthood-endorsed Attorney General of California in 2016, raided my apartment to seize hundreds of hours of unreleased undercover footage. Some of the biggest Planned Parenthood abortion centers got a federal judge in San Francisco, who previously opened and funded a Planned Parenthood clinic, to issue a federal injunction against the release of the remaining footage. I and my organization now face a total $25 million fine for our investigative reporting—I guess being able to continue to sell baby parts is worth at least $25 million to Planned Parenthood.
Aborted babies are only valuable for Planned Parenthood to harvest and sell and for government-funded laboratories to buy precisely because they are human beings just like us. But the message that our civilization needs more than ever right now is that the value of every human being is infinite. At a time when powerful government and media forces are trying to silence this message and well-meaning public officials sometimes struggle to find their voice, it is imperative for the people’s house to reopen formal investigations of the black market in aborted baby organ harvesting so that taxpayer-funded entities can never put a price tag on human beings.
