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 The justices declined to take up appeals by the abortion opponents
and left in place a lower court's ruling blocking the release of
videos that had the aim of exposing alleged illegal sales of aborted
fetal tissue for profit. The trial judge in the case concluded there
was no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by the abortion providers
captured in the videos.
The activists, including anti-abortion group Center for Medical
Progress founder David Daleiden, recorded the videos in 2014 and
2015 at annual meetings of the National Abortion Federation, a
nonprofit organization representing abortion providers including
affiliates of Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood has said the videos were heavily edited to leave
a false impression of wrongdoing.
The National Abortion Federation in 2015 sued Daleiden, the
California-based Center for Medical Progress and former center board
member Troy Newman to stop the release of videos.
The federation said the videos were illegally recorded at private
meetings protected by confidentiality agreements and that the
anti-abortion activists had infiltrated the meetings by posing as
executives of a company that bought fetal tissue.
U.S. District Judge William Orrick in San Francisco blocked the
release of the videos in 2016, ruling that enforcing the
confidentiality agreements would not violate free speech rights
under the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment. Orrick discounted the
claim by the abortion opponents that they were acting as "citizen
journalists" in an undercover investigation.
Such confidentiality agreements help ensure privacy and safety for
abortion providers given the increase in threats and violence they
faced since the defendants' release of other videos in July 2015,
Orrick said.
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The judge noted that in November 2015 a man fatally shot three
people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado. The man told
police he was upset with Planned Parenthood for performing abortions
and "the selling of body parts," according to court documents.
National Abortion Federation President Vicki Saporta said the video
campaign has put abortion providers at risk. "We are grateful that
the Supreme Court denied the defendants' latest attempt to
circumvent the very necessary security precautions NAF has in
place," Saporta said.
Daleiden's attorney Catherine Short said, "The Supreme Court seems
to have decided that the problems with Judge Orrick's gag order are
better addressed at lower court levels at this time."
Orrick later found Daleiden, the Center for Medical Progress and two
of his attorneys in contempt of court after they published some of
the blocked material on the internet.
The San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals last year
upheld the injunction against the videos' publication, prompting
Daleiden and Newman to appeal to the Supreme Court.
Daleiden and an associate, Sandra Merritt, last year were charged in
California with filming Planned Parenthood workers without their
consent.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung; Editing by Will Dunham)
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