A California court has ordered the pro-life Center for Medical Progress, the group behind a series of videos exposing Planned Parenthood for haggling over the price of aborted baby parts, to desist from released any new footage exposing the practice.
According to a report by Fox News, officials from a company that purchases baby parts from Planned Parenthood were granted a restraining order against CMP, restricting them from releasing new undercover video. At this point, CMP has released three videos showing a series of conversations about how much money Planned Parenthood receives for certain parts of a baby's aborted body. CMP reportedly has a dozen videos showing something similar. More (bolding is mine):
A temporary restraining order has been issued preventing an anti-abortion group from releasing any video of leaders of a California company that provides fetal tissue to researchers. The group is the same one that previously released three covertly shot videos of a Planned Parenthood leader discussing the sale of aborted fetuses for research.
The Los Angeles Superior Court order issued Tuesday prohibits the Center for Medical Progress from releasing any video of three high-ranking StemExpress officials taken at a restaurant in May. It appears to be the first legal action prohibiting the release of a video from the organization.
In the first video released by the Center for Medical Progress, Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood's senior director of medical services, describes techniques for obtaining fetal body parts for researchers to activists posing as potential buyers from a human biologics company over lunch. When asked about partnering with Planned Parenthood directly rather than through its affiliates, Nucatola mentioned StemExpress as one company that had approached them.
In another previously released video, a woman identified as a former StemExpress phlebotomist describes drawing blood and dissecting dead fetuses.
"I thought I was going to be just drawing blood, not procuring tissue from aborted fetuses," the employee, Holly O'Donnell, said.
According to attorney and law school professor Hugh Hewitt, this doesn't happen often:
Oh gosh, a prior restraint. I tell my law students they never will see one, but of course for PP all law must bend: http://t.co/b4ayPGZZmS
— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) July 30, 2015"StemExpress, a for-profit company partnered with over 30 abortion clinics, including Planned Parenthood, to harvest and sell aborted baby parts and provide a “financial benefit” to Planned Parenthood clinics, is attempting to use meritless litigation to cover-up this illegal baby parts trade, suppress free speech, and silence the citizen press reporting on issues of burning concern to the American public," CMP said in a statement in response to the lawsuit and restraining order. "They are not succeeding—their initial petition was rejected by the court, and their second petition was eviscerated to a narrow and contingent order about an alleged recording pending CMP’s opportunity to respond. The Center for Medical Progress follows all applicable laws in the course of our investigative journalism work and will contest all attempts from Planned Parenthood and their allies to silence our First Amendment rights and suppress investigative journalism."
Yesterday as Guy wrote, Planned Parenthood is desperately pleaded with the media to stop covering its baby parts scandal as lawmakers on Capitol Hill get read to vote on defunding the abortion giant. They've also allocated a significant amount of resources for damage control.
Besieged by negative headlines and a horrified public, Planned Parenthood has hired a crisis PR firm, which is attempting to mitigate the damage via the application of heavy pressure on media outlets (many of which are dominated by abortion supporters) to to ignore or soft-pedal the story.
CMP may be delayed for now on the release of new videos, but they have nearly a dozen of them which will eventually be produced for public viewing. Planned Parenthood and the companies who pay them for aborted body parts won't be able to hide behind lawsuits forever. Not to mention, even Hillary Clinton finds the videos "disturbing," which means at least some of her pro-choice, Democrat supporters do too.