Between 1972 and 1976, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein emerged as two of the most famous journalists in America and became forever identified as the reporters who broke the biggest story in American politics. Beginning with the investigation of a "third-rate burglary" of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex, Woodward and Bernstein uncovered a system of political "dirty tricks" and crimes that eventually led to indictments of forty White House and administration officials, and ultimately to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
Today we have entertainment masquerading as news and reporters who are want-to-be celebrities, primped up, politicized and often, but not always, biased. They are also anti-religion as to be religious is politically incorrect and could get a reporter fired except if they work at FOX News. I want to caution everyone, though, not to broadly paint reporters and the news media. I have several in my parish who are top notch and nothing like I describe, but alas!
So this brings me to the biggest story of the century although by all national and local press accounts one would not know it. Millions upon millions of babies have been slaughtered, murdered in abortion clinics and hospitals throughout this country and it turns out it is big business, lots of bucks, especially if one can salvage dead babies for body parts for research or even transplants to already born babies.
The biggest culprit in this murderous scheme is Planned Parenthood, although certainly there are other businesses profiting on this.
Who reported this with a top rate "spotlight" investigation???? A few pro-life individuals who knew what they were doing and did it. Don't count on the national reporters or even local reporters being so ingenious.
I doubt that anyone will remember the names of the pro-life Christians who exposed Planned Parenthood for it murderous ideologies and their profit over the murders of millions of children. The sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church pales in comparison to what Planned Parenthood has done to children! Reporters gladly investigated the Catholic Church and rightly so, but not so much on Planned Parenthood the greatest threat to children in America!
I read in the paper that the pro-life reporters are now being investigated. Interesting, no?
But thank God for Catholics like this!
Planned Parenthood Videographer Talks About His Pro-Life Vocation, Catholic Faith and Spiritual Life
David Daleiden, 26, told the Register, ‘Pro-life work brought me closer to the Catholic faith.'
David Daleiden
– Center For Medical Progress
David Daleiden, 26, has become Planned Parenthood’s public enemy No. 1 in recent months, as his nonprofit organization, the Center for Medical Progress,
began releasing undercover videos aboutPlanned Parenthood facilities
featuring abortionists discussing the sale of aborted baby body parts to
medical-research companies. Planned Parenthood is the nation’s largest
abortion provider, performing more than 300,000 abortions annually.
Daleiden called the surreptitious two and a half years of filming of Planned Parenthood staff the “Human Capital” project; currently, five of 12 videos have been released, which may be viewed on the organization’s website.
Court orders have temporarily halted the release of some of the other videos featuring leaders of StemExpress, a California company that provides fetal tissue to researchers, and footage taken at meetings of the National Abortion Federation.
He spoke with the Register last week about his pro-life vocation and his faith.
Did you get involved in pro-life work because of your Catholic faith?
It was actually the other way around. Pro-life work brought me closer to the Catholic faith. I grew up in a culturally Catholic home. I was the child of a crisis-pregnancy situation myself; my mother became pregnant with me in her junior year of college and gave birth to me in her senior year. My parents married after her graduation. You can see me as a baby in their wedding pictures.
When I was about 15, I joined my first pro-life group. It was also as a teen that I discovered the extraordinary form of the Mass and became more serious in my faith.
I attended Claremont McKenna College [in Claremont, Calif.], not really sure what I wanted to do. I had a passion for pro-life work, and it became clear to me that that is what God wanted me to do. From a Catholic perspective, I think of it as my vocation. When I do this work, it brings me closer to God, the greatest degree of intimacy with the Lord. Since spiritually I was benefitting from pro-life work, I thought I’d focus on doing it full time.
Today, the three things that spiritually influence me the most are 1) the extraordinary form of the Mass, 2) the message of Our Lady of Fatima and 3) the pastoral teaching of Pope Francis. I also benefit from the influence of my parish priest and the priests of the Fraternity of St. Peter. These priests bring us the sacraments, which are channels of grace from God into our lives.
Do you consider yourself an abortion survivor?
I’d say anyone born after 1973 [when the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision struck down the nation’s anti-abortion laws] counts as an abortion survivor, with some of us having closer calls than others.
In your videos, abortion workers pick through the remains of newly aborted babies. Was it hard to keep your composure at these times?
Yes. It was the most difficult thing I had to endure.
What were the biggest surprises of your “Human Capital” project?
The first was how easy it was to gain access to the highest levels of the Planned Parenthood organization by saying we wanted to buy their baby parts (although we didn’t phrase it quite so crudely). We said the “magic words.” It was the fast-track pathway into the heart of the abortion industry.
Another surprise was about how conflicted many abortion doctors are about the work that they do. In all kinds of ways, they rationalize or intellectualize what they do, or reframe the discussion, so they don’t have to deal with the consequences of their actions. They don’t want to deal with the valid grief and remorse they feel.
One of the abortion doctors we got to know, Deborah Nucatola, would choke up while talking about the specifics of the procedure. She’d wipe her eyes, but then move on and try to act like nothing had happened. She was not the only abortion doctor we met like that.
Were you surprised at the attention you received?
Yes. We sensed that it would be a big story, but did not anticipate the magnitude of the response that was to come. Ten presidential candidates, for example, commented on the videos.
What’s the status of releasing additional videos?
There are currently two lawsuits against us, one by StemExpress and the other by the National Abortion Federation. StemExpress has partnered with the most Planned Parenthood affiliates to harvest body parts. In a meeting with its CEO, Cate Dyer, she says that the company has received fully intact fetuses. Now, if a chemical is used to kill a baby during the abortion, it kills cells and makes the fetus unusable. So the baby would have to have been born alive and killed by vivisection or exposure or in transit. Just how the babies died is a question for law enforcement. But we’re talking about infanticide, with the lawsuit being used to cover up evidence of criminal activity.
The National Abortion Federation is a major trade organization of abortion doctors, which is about half Planned Parenthood. They want to prevent us from releasing information that was obtained at their annual meetings.
We have a talented legal team helping us, but we’d always welcome more assistance.
Why not cross the border into Mexico and post the videos?
That’s a question for my lawyer. But I do predict that the remaining seven of the 12 videos will come out in the near future.
What are the worst and best reactions you’ve received?
I’ve received some threats, including some people who say they’ll follow me home and do bad things to me. But the worst reaction, to me, is those who choose not to watch the videos and instead parrot the line Planned Parenthood’s allies in the media are making.
On the positive side, I’ve seen many people saying they can’t believe what’s going on in their country and are demanding that their public officials do something to stop it.
Daleiden called the surreptitious two and a half years of filming of Planned Parenthood staff the “Human Capital” project; currently, five of 12 videos have been released, which may be viewed on the organization’s website.
Court orders have temporarily halted the release of some of the other videos featuring leaders of StemExpress, a California company that provides fetal tissue to researchers, and footage taken at meetings of the National Abortion Federation.
He spoke with the Register last week about his pro-life vocation and his faith.
Did you get involved in pro-life work because of your Catholic faith?
It was actually the other way around. Pro-life work brought me closer to the Catholic faith. I grew up in a culturally Catholic home. I was the child of a crisis-pregnancy situation myself; my mother became pregnant with me in her junior year of college and gave birth to me in her senior year. My parents married after her graduation. You can see me as a baby in their wedding pictures.
When I was about 15, I joined my first pro-life group. It was also as a teen that I discovered the extraordinary form of the Mass and became more serious in my faith.
I attended Claremont McKenna College [in Claremont, Calif.], not really sure what I wanted to do. I had a passion for pro-life work, and it became clear to me that that is what God wanted me to do. From a Catholic perspective, I think of it as my vocation. When I do this work, it brings me closer to God, the greatest degree of intimacy with the Lord. Since spiritually I was benefitting from pro-life work, I thought I’d focus on doing it full time.
Today, the three things that spiritually influence me the most are 1) the extraordinary form of the Mass, 2) the message of Our Lady of Fatima and 3) the pastoral teaching of Pope Francis. I also benefit from the influence of my parish priest and the priests of the Fraternity of St. Peter. These priests bring us the sacraments, which are channels of grace from God into our lives.
Do you consider yourself an abortion survivor?
I’d say anyone born after 1973 [when the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision struck down the nation’s anti-abortion laws] counts as an abortion survivor, with some of us having closer calls than others.
In your videos, abortion workers pick through the remains of newly aborted babies. Was it hard to keep your composure at these times?
Yes. It was the most difficult thing I had to endure.
What were the biggest surprises of your “Human Capital” project?
The first was how easy it was to gain access to the highest levels of the Planned Parenthood organization by saying we wanted to buy their baby parts (although we didn’t phrase it quite so crudely). We said the “magic words.” It was the fast-track pathway into the heart of the abortion industry.
Another surprise was about how conflicted many abortion doctors are about the work that they do. In all kinds of ways, they rationalize or intellectualize what they do, or reframe the discussion, so they don’t have to deal with the consequences of their actions. They don’t want to deal with the valid grief and remorse they feel.
One of the abortion doctors we got to know, Deborah Nucatola, would choke up while talking about the specifics of the procedure. She’d wipe her eyes, but then move on and try to act like nothing had happened. She was not the only abortion doctor we met like that.
Were you surprised at the attention you received?
Yes. We sensed that it would be a big story, but did not anticipate the magnitude of the response that was to come. Ten presidential candidates, for example, commented on the videos.
What’s the status of releasing additional videos?
There are currently two lawsuits against us, one by StemExpress and the other by the National Abortion Federation. StemExpress has partnered with the most Planned Parenthood affiliates to harvest body parts. In a meeting with its CEO, Cate Dyer, she says that the company has received fully intact fetuses. Now, if a chemical is used to kill a baby during the abortion, it kills cells and makes the fetus unusable. So the baby would have to have been born alive and killed by vivisection or exposure or in transit. Just how the babies died is a question for law enforcement. But we’re talking about infanticide, with the lawsuit being used to cover up evidence of criminal activity.
The National Abortion Federation is a major trade organization of abortion doctors, which is about half Planned Parenthood. They want to prevent us from releasing information that was obtained at their annual meetings.
We have a talented legal team helping us, but we’d always welcome more assistance.
Why not cross the border into Mexico and post the videos?
That’s a question for my lawyer. But I do predict that the remaining seven of the 12 videos will come out in the near future.
What are the worst and best reactions you’ve received?
I’ve received some threats, including some people who say they’ll follow me home and do bad things to me. But the worst reaction, to me, is those who choose not to watch the videos and instead parrot the line Planned Parenthood’s allies in the media are making.
On the positive side, I’ve seen many people saying they can’t believe what’s going on in their country and are demanding that their public officials do something to stop it.
Jim Graves writes from Newport Beach, California.
15 comments:
And I'm sure when our Holy Father visits America he will address and condemn in the most forceful language the butchering of babies and the sale of their body parts like meat.....oh wait.....maybe not.
I just celebrated the memorial for the Martyrs Pontian and Hippolytus. Did you know that Pontian resigned the papacy and was placed into exile in Sardinia by the Roman Emperor and that Hippolytus, a rigorist (like some who comment here) a mere priest too, didn't like the subsequent popes who were too much like Pope Francis is today in terms of mercy and forgiveness. So under three legitimate popes and for 18 years he became an anti-Pope for he was holier than anyone else in the papacy, more Catholic than them. He was a schismatic in other words, as anti-pope, having taken on the papacy for himself since he was so perfect and knew he could make for a perfect Church without any warts whatsoever.
He was exiled to Sardinia eventually too and repented of his self-righteous, rigorous ways, since he finally realized he wasn't so perfect after all having been a schismatic anti-pope for 18 years. He was reconciled to the Church and the true papacy and along with Hippolytus in Sardinia he was martyred for the faith and is now an example of faith that he wasn't in his real life until his exile. God is good!
Oh FOR PETE'S SAKE!
Seriously? I don't doubt that Hippolytus was an anti-pope, or a sinner in need of ongoing repentance, but to claim his rigorism was exactly like many peoples' critiques of Pope Francis is rich indeed.
a) criticizing someone for causing scandal is not the same thing as declaring one's own innocence. But shooting the messenger for not being utterly perfect is the first refuge of scoundrels.
If I - the broken vessel that I am, the miserable lay man that I am, decry as unfortunate or wrong a pastor's vague equivocal language of "mercy" is tantamount to denying that sodomy is a sin and directly leads homosexual activists to crow with glee that they are justified in sodomy while condemning as sinful 'haters' all who disagree with this error....where am I thus declaring my sinlessness?
I'm not! Pointing out the fault of another so as to remain faithful to the deposit of faith is not the same thing as declaring oneself utterly pure.
A smoker can tell a child to not start smoking without being a hypocrite. An addict can warn others to not fall into addiction without being a hypocrite.
A person of scrupulous conscience can (and ought) to warn those of LAX consciences....
We desperately need clarity in our moral and religious discourse. The vague, fuzzy language about God, man, and morality is deadly to the degree it allows or makes easy equivocal conclusions. If it becomes easy for a lax soul to conclude his immoral behavior is actually fine and dandy because of something we've said then they remain in error but WE pay the penalty for their damnation.
Pointing out that this is a terrible state of affairs is no sin and it's not to set oneself up as a religious authority anymore than St. Paul chiding St. Peter in Antioch was a case of St. Paul staging a coup against St. Peter's authority.
Telling the boss he's wrong or made a mistake is not a sin and it's not treason.
One of the first people calling for the investigation of the Center for Medical Progress was the "Catholic" Governor of California, Edmund G."Jerry" Brown Jr,--Governor Moonbeam. Ironically, he once was determined to become a priest and lived in a Jesuit novitiate house for a time.
This should not surprise us as many of the enemies of God and His Church seem to have come from the ranks of once-faithful Catholics, even as early as King Henry Tudor of England, who was once honored by his pope as a "Defender of the Faith."
Now many of these enemies come from the ranks WITHIN the Church, some at the highest levels.
Hippolytus didn't really find his faith until he realized that it would cost him and he was willing to pay the price. We have many within our Church who would try to re-create a faith that costs nothing, "embraces" all (substituting "tolerance" for mercy) and walks hand in hand with the secular world, aping its values, relishing political power and substituting faith in saving the earth rather than saving souls.
Draw your own conclusions.
And Fr. MacDonald, you are mentioning this why exactly? You comment on a story about Planned Parenthood's murder and dissection of human infants, their selling the body parts of these little murder victims, and your response is to imply that Catholics who desperately want their Pope to talk publicly about this are somehow acting holier than thou? What is wrong with you? Do you work for Planned Parenthood's damage control committee? Because you certainly sound like it. Those babies (and now their mothers who know just who-not what was killed, and what was done to them) were placed into a living hell on earth and you pontificate about being 'judgey' about this particular Pope? The main focus of the introduction to this article was about how the media are trying to ignore the story. You are part of the problem.
Interesting coincidence that you would hold up Watergate as an example of good journalism, in light of a piece last week by Pat Buchanan on Watergate, Woodward, and Bernstein:
http://buchanan.org/blog/the-plot-to-destroy-nixon-16324
An excerpt:"The subtitle of the new paperback of “All the President’s Men” is, “The Greatest Reporting Story of All Time.” Excuse me, but how much reporting does it take to scribble down notes from Mark Felt telling you who said what to the grand jury that day? This is stenography, not reporting.
Admittedly, Buchanan has cause to be biased, but it's an interesting perspective.
Thanks be to God for David Daleiden and whoever else assisted him with this, in possessing the initiative, courage, and insight to look into what Planned Parenthood was doing, and in also acquiring the necessary skills to do so.
"Do you consider yourself an abortion survivor?
I’d say anyone born after 1973 [when the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision struck down the nation’s anti-abortion laws] counts as an abortion survivor, with some of us having closer calls than others."
I'd say that anyone born after December 7, 1941, counts as a survivor of Pearl Harbor... Anyone born after 9/11 counts as a survivor the the attack on the Work Trade Towers...
Sorry, David, it just doesn't work that way.
Anon 6:25pm:
The over forty million babies killed-on-demand since 1973 can be called victims and it does work that way.
Anyway,
For Premeditated Parenthood to survive it must convince enough unwary people that certain people aren't people (or not people enough). It's so sad and so Evil. I wonder how more diabolical the abortion business will become?
Yes, Paul, there have been millions of innocent victims of abortion, both the children who died and the families who also suffered from and suffer from their deaths.
But Mr. Daleiden is being very melodramatic and not a little bit overly imaginative when he calls himself a survivor of abortion. Can I call myself a survivor of WW2 even though I was born more than 10 years after it ended? No, because that's not how it works.
His tactics are not, in the long run, going to move us toward a culture of life PRECISELY because it is his tactics that will be discussed.
Anonymous's analogy to World War 2 would be more appropriate if he were to say that any European Jew (and his descendants) could rightly consider him or herself a "survivor" of the holocaust even if his particular country wasn't successfully conquered by the Germans.
Anon,
The Abortion War is ongoing, hostilities and atrocities have not stopped. The War may be happening in a neighborhood near you.
Abortion is an ongoing threat to life and limb.
Thus any child conceived in the USA since 1973 was conceived into a nation that held it completely licit and valid for their mother to hire an assassin to kill them privately no questions asked from conception to the moment of delivery 40 weeks later.
And with 1 in 3 pregnancies ending in abortion, the chances of any child being aborted is much higher than the chances of any soldier being hurt in any war.
So in a real way, people can say they ran the gauntlet and survived.
Why this is even debated is creepy. Why the need to downplay or ameliorate or mitigate the horror that is abortion? Why the mental gymnastics, the grasping for straws, the verbal games of euphemisms and justifications?
Our nation was founded on the premise that inalienable human rights exist independent of government and the sayso of other people (like a woman and her doctor). It was on the basis of this belief in inalienable rights that the perfectly constitutional, legal justification for slavery was fought against and before that, the oaths of allegiance to crown and country were repudiated.
But in the name of sex, in 1973, our federal government changed its core justification from inalienable to alienable privileges. From Right justifies Might to Might makes anything right.
And it was largely a bi-partisan decision by our political and judicial leadership that decided this was so. So naturally, as a hated minority, us Catholics seeking for scraps around the Master's table would feel as though we must accept subtle apostasy on this point so as to remain respectable.
Well..... anyone who thought that was a fool.
Our job as Catholics is to convert, not be converted. Our souls will be judged not on getting along with everyone else but in converting them and saving their souls, not their feelings.
Vision people, we need vision to see what doesn't exist but can be.... I don't for a second accept that the United States of America must accept abortion as a given or that there's some iron rule of History that makes post-Christian secular progressives the "wave of the future". No way. Not so long as we draw breath.
So don't down play the horror of abortion. Stare into the abyss of human evil and conquer evil with good. We can longer look them in the eyes than they can look us.
"Our nation was founded on the premise that inalienable human rights exist independent of government . . . ."
I'm not sure this is accurate. Our nation was founded as a result of a revolution led by an established aristocracy who was seeking to alleviate their tax burden and divest themselves of foreign debt. To accomplish that goal, they used enlightenment ideals like the social contract and the rights of man. To disprove any notion that they actually believed in those ideals and rights, it is enough to point out that they did not undertake the abolition of slavery, as others inspired by the enlightenment had been doing.
define who "they" were please.
The founding fathers - indeed that whole generation - were divided on the slavery issue. But not being utterly perfect does not make their motives questionable.
Without the ideas in the DofI the later abolitionists would have had a hard time justifying their position. But even before we discuss slavery, we need to point out that all of them were Englishmen, citizens of the commonwealth, who had sworn oaths of allegiance to crown and country.
So how they could honorably entertain treason against king and country was vindicated by referring to a higher power than king and country, namely, the Creator.
But while we're at it, it probable might help if we reflect that all wars are fought over real or perceived injustice and part of virtually every conflict are claims and counterclaims of breaches of private property.
We do anyone a fundamental disservice if we declare their motives impure because they include economic considerations by claiming they were motived solely by economic considerations.
Indeed, there were religious, cultural, and personal reasons for most colonists to prefer the risk of self-rule over the perceived safety of staying under the rule of Britain. Lo and Behold, the details of the grievances enumerated in the Declaration spell out the many, many abuses that affected this or that smaller group which, when taken as a whole could be said to have caused perhaps 1/3rd of all colonists to feel they had nothing to lose by rebellion.
Given what we know about the colonies, it's untrue to claim all rebels were aristocrats. Most were middle class or farmers. Most were tradesmen or frontiersmen. They were all jacks of all trade by force of the local economy. A fisherman also smuggled goods. Farmers also hunted and traded goods. The aristocratic landowners like Washington also worked as surveyors.
Thus, just as we didn't invade and justify our invasion of Iraq on a single cause (Weapons of mass destruction), neither did the colonies rebel merely for escaping taxation without representation or merely to get rich quick without paying their 'fair share'.
It's a mature thing to accept that people are complicated and motivated by more than one thing.... that pro-abortionists are motivated by more than loathing of responsibility or pro-lifers are motivated solely and exclusively for the unborn and care not a whit for the mother.
It's not true that pro-aborts have a single reason for abortion or that pro-lifers have a single reason to be against abortion. It's not true that Democrats are 100% for the "little guy" and Republicans are 100% fat cat industrialists smoking cigars and hoarding bags of money.
Many women who seek abortion feel as though they have NO CHOICE while their defenders claim it's entirely about "choice". So there is the reality and the spin. They're not the same thing. The Founding fathers' motives and what later generations spin as their 'real' motive (curiously always to deny them honor) is likewise two different things.
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