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WASHINGTON, D.C.—The process The Center for Medical Progress (CMP) used to obtain undercover videos released last summer outing Planned Parenthood’s sale of aborted baby parts was not morally wrong, according to CMP founder David Daleiden.
Daleiden shared his convictions during an interview with Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) of the Southern Baptist Convention, and Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family, at the Evangelicals for Life conference, Thursday (Jan. 21). The conference, co-sponsored by the ERLC and Focus on the Family, is being held in Washington D.C. as a pre-event for Saturday’s March for Life.
Moore introduced Daleiden as the man who, through his videos, “pierced the conscience of the nation.” Daleiden received a standing ovation from the crowd gathered at the Hyatt Regency Capitol Hill hotel.
Moore pointed out that many criticize the ethics of the CMP videos, saying that in order to produce them, he had to lie while undercover.
“Are you kind of making morality relative here by using lying and deception?” Moore asked.
Daleiden responded that Moore asked a valid question.
“I think that undercover work is fundamentally different from lying because the purpose of undercover work is to serve the truth and to bring the truth to greater clarity and to communicate the truth more strongly,” Daleiden said.
“At the heart of the whole baby parts issue there is this really cool paradox that I can never get over, and it’s part of what drove me to do a really specific study on it for two and a half years, and it’s the fact that unborn children—the human fetus—their humanity is not considered to be equal enough to our own in order to be completely protected by law and order, to be completely protected from being killed by abortion, but at the same time it’s precisely that equal humanity that is identical to our own that makes them so valuable for scientific experimentation and makes Planned Parenthood and researchers and their allies hunt after their body parts like buried treasure.”—CMP Founder, David Daleiden
“Certainly, in normal every life, we don’t always communicate the truth by a simple, one equals one, mathematical way of speaking. We often use poetry and metaphor and even pretext in order to communicate really important truth in a more clear way. Our Lord did that in the Gospels with the parables; it’s often done throughout the Holy Scriptures; and so I see undercover work in that same sort of vein, as a creative way of communicating and speaking that is in service of the truth.”
Moore and Daly went on to ask Daleiden about his response to critics who cite the videos as being heavily edited, to which Daleiden replied that CMP has been “more transparent than any news agency” in showing what goes into the production of video files that wind up as the final cuts seen by the American public.
Noting that the work to investigate the abortion giant and then to produce those investigations in video form was a task that no doubt took a large amount of time and effort, Moore asked Daleiden what shaped his own personal pro-life view.
“I myself am actually the child of a crisis pregnancy situation,” Daleiden said. “My parents got pregnant with me their junior year of college. They gave birth to me their senior year and got married after graduation. I grew up in a home that was kind of nominally or culturally Catholic, … but I always grew up with the sense really strongly that sometimes people get pregnant and have kids in less than totally perfect situations or less than perfectly planned situations, and that ultimately there is nothing wrong with that, and there is nothing shameful about that because ‘now’ is always a good time to welcome a new little person into the world. So that was really formative to me in terms of how we treat people and how we respect people.”
Daly asked Daleiden how he developed the strategy of using undercover investigative videos to address the issue of abortion in America.
“I think part of the power of the videos that CMP has put out so far and part of the power of the whole ‘baby body parts’ issue, is that it speaks to really core human values and American values that a lot of people share regardless of your political persuasions or regardless of your level of political engagement or even philosophical engagement with issues like abortion or related issues,” Daleiden said.
“At the heart of the whole baby parts issue there is this really cool paradox that I can never get over, and it’s part of what drove me to do a really specific study on it for two and a half years, and it’s the fact that unborn children—the human fetus—their humanity is not considered to be equal enough to our own in order to be completely protected by law and order, to be completely protected from being killed by abortion, but at the same time it’s precisely that equal humanity that is identical to our own that makes them so valuable for scientific experimentation and makes Planned Parenthood and researchers and their allies hunt after their body parts like buried treasure. I think that contradiction throws the whole world of legalized abortion in America in to a really stark light, and it highlights that contrast between some of our deepest values about human dignity and human equality as people and as Americans.”
They also discussed the millennial generation and how Daleiden, 27, looks with hope toward the young people of America—his peers—in seeing how they’ve been disturbed by the atrocities still being committed in America in 2016 and their willingness to get involved. Before leaving the stage, Daly and Moore prayed over Daleiden, specifically asking the Lord to give him wisdom and courage.
