Last week, the state of California dropped all felony charges against pro-life activist David Daleiden and fellow journalist Sandra Merritt. The two have been targeted since 2015 after they released a series of videos in which Planned Parenthood employees admitted to the selling of unborn baby parts. According to a statement by Daleiden’s Center for Medical Progress, their hard-fought plea deal against the charge of unlawful recording will mean “no jail time, no fines, no admission of wrongdoing, and no probation.” 

This is a clear victory, not just for the accused but for the pro-life cause and the entire American justice system. Steve Cooley, lead defense attorney for Daleiden, said: 

In my 5 decades as an attorney, 40 years of which were as a prosecutor, I have never seen such a blatant exercise of selective investigation and vindictive prosecution. The California Attorneys General who initiated this case and pursued it for nearly 10 years should be ashamed for weaponizing their office to pursue people who were merely exposing illegality associated with the harvesting and sale of fetal body parts. 

Daleiden has indeed been harassed by a series of prosecutors for the better part of a decade, most notably former Vice President Kamala Harris when she was California’s attorney general. His “crime” was exposing the despicable practices of the nation’s most prominent abortion business, which, along with the National Abortion Federation, had been illegally marketing human remains for scientific research. Rather than go after the wrongdoers, prosecutors went after the one who exposed the wrongdoing. 

Daleiden, Merritt, and others recorded Planned Parenthood employees bragging about their ability to “pull off a leg or two” and secure “livers and cardiac” tissue. Another joked that if people were to hear that they were haggling over legs, “. . .they’d be like, ‘You are [expletive] evil!’” Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards, who passed away recently, denied wrongdoing and accused Daleiden of deceptive editing. 

If the revelations had to do with any other topic or any other organization, there’s no question who would have been on trial. However, because in America abortion has “harmed everything and solved nothing,” Daleiden has spent years fighting unjust criminal charges. The misguided zeal that motivated Harris and other progressive prosecutors demonstrates how much abortion operates at the very center of progressive ideology. It is the most sacred of all progressive sacred cows, uniting three non-negotiables: absolute individual autonomy, the prioritization of sex, and the willingness to harm self or others for the sake of libertine freedom. To preserve the most radical abortion laws in the Western world, corporate and governmental activists were willing to turn the legal system on its head. 

In the progressive mind, everything was at stake here. That’s why in this case, as it was in the cases of Colorado baker Jack Phillips and Washington florist Barronelle Stutzman, the process of relentless prosecution is the punishment. The strategy of ruining lives and financial futures with constant “lawfare” sends a clear message to anyone else wanting to buck the system. At the same time, it is a way, as one gay activist described their strategy after the Obergefell decision, “to punish the wicked.” 

Currently, on a state-by-state level, so much depends on who is in charge. Therefore, the only long-term fix is to make abortion unthinkable, like slavery and other historical evils. Despite the very clear science that an unborn child is a child and the dramatic legal victory three years ago with the Dobbs decision, too many of our neighbors remain unconvinced that humans in the womb are worth saving, and they remain convinced of the myth of sexual autonomy. The same worldview that drives progressives to chase pro-lifers into court has clouded the ability of millions to discern right from wrong. 

The battle for the preborn remains at hand. We do not yet know whether ours is a Wilberforce moment of God-granted victory or a Bonhoeffer moment that will cost us everything. As Chuck Colson said, God has called us to faithfulness, not success. So, even as we thank God for this end to David Daleiden’s trials, we must ask if we will take up our own place in that same fight for life.