A day before March for Life, dozens braved 14-degree weather to join pro-life leaders in protest outside the construction site for Washington D.C.’s newly commissioned Planned Parenthood clinic. While MRC Culture spied plenty of cameras at the event, the media have yet to report on it.
Pro-lifers from every generation, both old warhorses and young new voices, gathered at 9am to pray and speak on behalf of the unborn who have no voice to defend themselves against abortion.
While Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life and Rev. Patrick Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition led the event, the main speaker was the Center for Medical Progress’ Project Lead, David Daleiden -- the man behind the undercover videos released last summer showing, among other things, Planned Parenthood executives haggling over the price of aborted baby parts.
“Planned Parenthood is on the defense and the public is looking with renewed scrutiny and disgust at Planned Parenthood's barbaric abortion and baby parts business,” Daleiden stressed at the event.
Daleiden also pointed out a suspicious connection between Planned Parenthood’s abortion agenda and the cash flow within the organization.
Planned Parenthood’s Consortium of Abortion Providers, which sets the abortion policy for the organization nationwide, “is offering grants to the different affiliates who can extend their gestational age later in term,” Daleiden said. “For every week, they’ve got another grant for how far you can go.”
Daleiden noted that the abortion giant has begun the trend of consolidating its facilities into mega-centers like “fortresses” (or a “castle of the evil baron in a fairytale”) in centralized locations because it’s on the defense.
“They’re on the ropes right now and the days of legalized, state-subsidized industrial-skilled child killing in our country are numbered,” he continued.
“I’m convinced that 2016, that this year,” he announced to cheers, “is going to be a historic watershed moment for abortion and for unborn children and how we talk about them and how we treat them in our country.”
Although Planned Parenthood filed a lawsuit against him just last week, Daleiden argued that the abortion giant should be wary of its own legality as an organization.
“The organized crime case against Planned Parenthood pretty much writes itself,” he urged. “Money laundering from baby parts, homicide of born-alive infants, obstruction of justice, all of it.”
“And what they don’t throw at us is defamation or libel or slander or anything like that. Because they know they can’t prove that,” Daleiden said.
Although the upcoming lawsuit means work for Daleiden and his team, the new pro-life leader is confident that, in the long run, the lawsuit will work in his favor -- and the favor of the unborn.
“All of the dirty details of their abortion practice, of their baby parts business, all of that is going to be brought into the courtroom,” he said.
The monster company will not be able to hide the “kickbacks that their doctors and their executives and their board members got from Advanced Bioscience Resources for the past 10 years,” Daleiden said.
They will also be forced to address the “very clear admissions about partial-birth abortion procedures that their senior director of medical services admitted to using to harvest intact baby parts and that she trains other Planned Parenthood doctors to use.”
Even on the eve of the the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, Daleiden concluded that he is “very very hopeful that, that if we continue to be faithful, we continue to stand on our post, to trust God to take the next right step, that together we will see an end to abortion in America and we see a day when there’s no longer a price tag put on human life.”
Besides Daleiden, other speakers included Mark Harrington, Director of Created Equal, Dr. Monica Miller, Director of Citizens for a Pro-Life Society, Eric Scheidler, Executive Director of the Pro-Life Action League and many others.
Fr. Pavone, who led the group in prayer along with Rev. Mahoney, encouraged all to keep praying as well as protesting.
“To take a stand against the kind of killing that takes place in facilities like this, is precisely the fruit of prayer,” he argued.
The protest was part of #ProtestPP, a coalition of state and national pro-life groups that have organized several nationwide protests against Planned Parenthood in response to the CMP videos. On the first, held August 22, more than 78,000 Americans across the country rallied to protest at over 340 Planned Parenthood clinics in the U.S. and abroad.
The broadcast networks chose to ignore the event and its enormous turnout.
D.C.’s only Planned Parenthood clinic closed after decades last year, with plans to move to the new one, currently under construction at 1225 Fourth Street NE.
