SEATTLE (LifeSiteNews) – Attorneys with the pro-life legal nonprofit Thomas More Society have delivered a victory for pro-life investigative journalist David Daleiden in his ongoing battle with the University of Washington, reaching a settlement that will shed even more light on the university’s ongoing sale of and experimentation on fetal tissue derived from abortions.
Under the settlement, UW agreed to hand over “significant”
documents pertaining to its acquisition and sale of human body parts from
aborted babies (with unredacted job titles) and subsequent research and to
agreements with Planned Parenthood or other abortion providers, as well as
communications and manuals pertaining to related policies, reports, research,
financial records, contracts, and grant applications. UW will also pay Thomas
More $30,000 in legal fees.
“There’s no
‘abortion exception’ to our nation’s public records laws, and the People have a
right to know how their government is run,” said Thomas More’s vice president
and senior counsel Peter Breen. “We are pleased at the successful resolution of
this lawsuit by settlement. That settlement secured attorney’s fees from the UW
and nearly everything that David Daleiden was seeking from the UW: thousands of
pages of new documents on the buying and selling of aborted fetal tissue
trafficking, including job titles and all non-personal information. These are
public records of a taxpayer-funded program, and this settlement secures Mr.
Daleiden’s rights to the documents he needs as a citizen journalist.”
As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, the University of Washington
has for years fought in court to keep the details of its fetal tissue
activities out of the public eye.
The legal battle began when Daleiden requested documents
from the school’s taxpayer-funded Birth Defects Research Laboratory about
trafficking in aborted fetal parts and organs. The public information request
was met with a lawsuit from staff of Planned Parenthood and other abortion
centers, along with researchers and others, to force heavy redaction of these
government documents.
In March, the groups Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising,
Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust, Pro-Life San Francisco, and Rehumanize
International located and photographed a freezer at the University of
Washington’s Seattle campus containing rows of bags containing aborted fetal
bodies and body parts.
The sale of aborted fetal remains for research and
experimentation first came to the political forefront in 2015, when Daleiden’s
group Center for Medical Progress (CMP) began releasing undercover videos of
meetings with Planned Parenthood and National Abortion Federation personnel
detailing the practice, which set off a firestorm of controversy and a string
of revelations about the abortion industry breaking multiple federal laws
against profiting off human tissue, altering abortion procedures for the sake
of procuring better tissue samples, and potentially even committing
partial-birth abortions or infanticide; as well as video examples of abortion
workers displaying callousness toward the humanity of the children their work
killed.
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