Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Life Legal Defense Fund’s defense of the Center of Medical Progress’ use of undercover videos of Planned Parenthood selling fetal body parts

Yesterday FOT hosted Alexandra Snyder, executive director of Life Legal Defense Foundation, and Life Legal’s activities on behalf of David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) and their undercover videos showing how Planned Parenthood was attempting to sell the body parts of aborted babies. Later in the day Life Legal released the following Thanksgiving message which further explains the legal situation in which David and CMP find themselves. So in case you missed the program, here is the statement from Life Legal:

Life Legal is grateful for the opportunity to represent David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress (CMP). Earlier this year, David released the first of a series of undercover videos exposing Planned Parenthood’s sale of baby body parts.

We wanted to give you an overview of what has happened on the legal front since then.

In July, shortly after the release of the first video, David was hit with two separate lawsuits. The first was filed by StemExpress, a procurer or broker of fetal body parts. The second suit was filed by the National Abortion Federation (NAF), of which Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers are members. The NAF lawsuit alleged thirteen separate counts of action and sought an injunction to keep David’s videos out of public view. NAF is represented by one of the largest law firms in the nation, employing some 1,000 attorneys.

In August, Life Legal filed an “anti-SLAPP” motion. A “SLAPP” or Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation is designed to chill speech by making it prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to defend a lawsuit. Life Legal argues that NAF’s suit is baseless and was only filed to silence David and prevent the public from knowing the truth about the trade in fetal body parts. NAF later amended its complaint, and Life Legal plans to respond with another anti-SLAPP motion.

In September the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals got involved by issuing a temporary stay on discovery, which was later lifted.  September also saw the first of many congressional hearings in conjunction with a formal investigation into the practices of Planned Parenthood. As part of the investigation, Congress issued a subpoena seeking CMP’s raw video footage, which NAF attempted to prevent CMP from complying with.

In October, a federal court ruled that CMP could send the videos to Congress.

The NAF lawsuit is currently in the discovery phase, which means that David and his lead attorney, Life Legal’s Katie Short, have spent long hours in depositions and preparing papers this month. Katie is preparing for another critical federal court hearing, which is scheduled for mid-December.

For background information on this very important case, please see Life Legal timeline page.

While this will be a long fight, we are doing everything we can to protect David’s First Amendment rights and to fight the allegations leveled against him. This is truly David versus the Goliaths of the abortion industry and we are so grateful for your help.

This Thanksgiving, Life Legal thanks you, our friends and supporters! You make it possible for us to continue defending the defenders of life.

No comments:

Post a Comment