California prosecutors filed felony charges on Tuesday against two anti-abortion activists who secretly recorded videos in an attempt to discredit abortion providers, saying that some of the recordings violated the state’s privacy law.

Xavier Becerra, the state attorney general, charged David R. Daleiden, 28, and Sandra S. Merritt, 63, with 14 counts of illegal recording, and one count of conspiracy. In 2014 and 2015, they met with employees of Planned Parenthood and other groups that perform abortions and a business that supplies fetal tissue for research, surreptitiously recorded their conversations and released edited versions of some of the videos online.

They claimed to have gathered evidence that abortion providers and others were selling tissue from aborted fetuses for profit, which is illegal, but subsequent investigations failed to find evidence of that.

Critics said Mr. Daleiden and Ms. Merritt, who were working for the Center for Medical Progress, an anti-abortion group that was previously obscure, had deceptively edited the videos and misrepresented what they showed.