Three years ago, a young activist named David Daleiden walked into the offices of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue in Wichita, Kansas, with a plan to take down legal abortion in America by accusing Planned Parenthood of illegally selling fetal tissue for profit. Troy Newman, the head of Operation Rescue, explained the meeting this way in an interview with Religious Right broadcaster Jerry Newcombe: The genesis happened three years ago in my office in Wichita, Kansas, where we discussed the fact that we already knew that Planned Parenthood was breaking the law in trafficking in human organs after their abortions, and so we decided and set out to go ahead and expose that and create an investigative journalism organization that would embed ourselves into the abortion cartel and to catch them off-script. Newman told Fox News that he and Daleiden “hit it off very, very well, and we began discussing all the various techniques he would have to use in order to infiltrate Planned Parenthood.” Cheryl Sullenger, Operation Rescue’s senior policy advisor, who spent time in jail in the 1980s for conspiring to bomb an abortion clinic, told an anti-abortion radio program in Ohio that Daleiden approached Operation Rescue because he “shared our vision for obtaining criminal prosecutions” of Planned Parenthood officials with the ultimate goal of bringing an “end to the abortion industry in America”: About three years ago, David Daleiden came here to Wichita and actually visited us in our office, and he had discussions with Troy about his visions for this undercover project. … David was really motivated to conduct a long-term investigative study of Planned Parenthood and their practices regarding the buying and selling of aborted baby remains. And the reason that he came to us was because he shared our vision for obtaining criminal prosecutions and really doing something substantial to report these abuses, document and report them, and bring an end to not only these practices, but an end to the abortion industry in America. And he knew if he focused on Planned Parenthood that would be probably the most powerful way to do that. Thus was born the Center for Medical Progress, the “investigative journalism organization” that Newman and Daleiden had envisioned, whose deceptively edited videos claiming that Planned Parenthood sells fetal tissue for profit have been roundly debunked, but have nevertheless led to House hearings, the withdrawal of some state funding from Planned Parenthood and the threat of a government shutdown, and contributed to the resignation of House Speaker John Boehner. The fact that Daleiden is a relatively fresh face in the anti-abortion movement and formed a brand new organization to back up his activism has somewhat obscured the extent to which Operation Rescue appears to have been involved in his work. The Center for Medical Progress’ initial tax filing lists only three officers of the organization: Daleiden as its CEO, Newman as its secretary and Albin Rhomberg, the California activist, as its chief financial officer. The Daily Beast pointed out that in Operation Rescue’s announcement of Daleiden’s second video, “the logo for the CMP’s Human Capital Project includes the phrase ‘In consultation with Operation Rescue.’” Newman told Newcombe that he has acted as an “adviser” and “consultant” and provided “a bit of material support” to Daleiden (it’s still unclear how much that “bit” was; Daleiden says his shoestring budget of about $120,000 came from “15 to 20 very dedicated donors”), but said that he left it to Daleiden to do most of the on-the-ground work on the project because the young activist would not be recognized by Planned Parenthood employees. “The beautiful thing about David Daleiden is he’s just a courageous young man with a very clean record,” Newman said. “Just coming right in, he’s not recognizable by anybody, so he was able to walk into these meetings completely unnoticed.” The Center for Medical Progress’ existence as a separate entity from Operation Rescue has also provided cover for the anti-choice activists and politicians who have flocked to promote Daleiden’s videos. Members of Congress and state legislators were given advance screenings. Conservative groups coordinated behind the scenes to push them far and wide. House Republicans played excerpts at a hearing. It is doubtful that so many leading conservatives would have been willing to associate themselves with a project conducted under the name of Operation Rescue, which has become synonymous with anti-choice radicalism. Troy Newman does not speak in the polished talking points of more prominent anti-abortion leaders. Instead, he pickets in front of schools with posters of aborted fetuses, calls women who have had abortions “murderers,” thinks emergency contraception is also “murder,” and has blamed everything from the AIDS epidemic to the 9/11 terrorist attacks to the current drought in California on God’s disapproval of legal abortion. Although Newman has never directly advocated for violence against abortion providers, and has occasionally explicitly renounced it, he and Operation Rescue grew out of activist circles that included advocates of violence and assassins of abortion providers.

Decades of Attacks on Planned Parenthood

Operation Rescue and the Anti-Choice Fringes

Mark Crutcher and the Origins of Anti-Abortion “Guerilla” Tactics

As Troy Newman was cutting his teeth at Operation Rescue and Cheryl Sullenger was reentering the “rescue” movement after her time in prison, Mark Crutcher – the Life Dynamics leader who decades later would inspire David Daleiden’s Planned Parenthood smear ­­­– was pioneering his own brand of anti-choice activism in Texas. In 1992, Crutcher wrote an influential underground manual called “Firestorm: A Guerrilla Strategy for a Pro-life America,” which laid out his strategy of ending legal abortion “through the attrition of the pool of abortionists” – making life so difficult for abortion providers that few would choose to stay in the field or go into it in the first place. His goal, he wrote, was “to make it as hard as possible for the abortion industry to recruit new abortionists by reinforcing and heightening the stigma within the medical community which abortionists already experience … If we accomplish that goal, we will create an environment in which no legitimate physician would ever want to become an abortionist, and we will win through the attrition of the pool of abortionists.” Crutcher started offering trainings in his techniques to activists across the country. As long as abortion providers could legally continue with their work, he told one group, they should know that their lives are “going to be miserable.” Among the tactics that Crutcher himself used for making the lives of abortion providers miserable were printing the faces of abortion providers on posters and plastering them around the doctors’ neighborhoods; recruiting “spies for life” to find which doctors and hospitals performed abortions; encouraging lawyers to file malpractice lawsuits against providers for what he called “post abortion trauma syndrome;” and encouraging his followers to spam the 800 numbers of abortion clinics across the country to drive up their costs. In 1993, Crutcher made national news when he somehow obtained the addresses of tens of thousands of U.S. medical students and sent them a “joke book” called “Bottom Feeders” in which he had taken jokes about lawyers and other professions and edited them to be about “abortionists.” Many of the students who received the booklets were not amused. One sample “joke” read: Q.: What would you do if you found yourself in a room with Hitler, Mussolini and an abortionist and you had a gun with only two bullets? A: Shoot the abortionist twice. Crutcher said that he was merely trying to illustrate that jokes that seem innocuous when told about lawyers suddenly get people “excited” when you tell them about “the slime of the earth” – abortion providers. But he admitted that the purpose was to scare off future doctors from providing abortions. “Basically, what we’re saying to the medical community is, ‘Look, if you want to do abortions, that’s fine, but you’d better understand something,’” Crutcher told a reporter. “‘There’s a hell of a price to pay.’” In the 1990s, Crutcher also began experimenting with the sham investigative techniques that Life Dynamics later became known for. In one early project, he invented a fake pro-choice organization and contacted hundreds of abortion providers pretending to be conducting a survey. He asked the providers if they felt “ostracized” or if they had been victims of “harassment,” and was encouraged by the numbers who answered “yes,” taking it as a sign of the anti-choice movement’s success. When Crutcher revealed who had really been behind the survey, providers were left feeling “violated” and uneasy. He later mailed the results of his sham survey to his list of medical students. When asked about his tactics in 1995, Crutcher responded, “It’s a war, and in a war you do things that are distasteful in a non-war environment.” Crutcher, like Troy Newman, was less than unequivocal in denouncing the violence that was taking place on the fringes of the anti-choice movement. After multiple abortion clinic workers were killed in 1994, Crutcher, who had predicted growing anti-abortion violence in “Firestorm,” blamed the FACE Act, the law that had ensured free access to abortion clinics. Mark Crutcher The Clinton administration is creating a situation where there's more danger for a pro-lifer to protest abortion clinics than to blow them up. “The Clinton administration is creating a situation where there’s more danger for a pro-lifer to protest abortion clinics than to blow them up,” he told a journalist. He added: “Before we get on our high horse about whether this is justified or not, we need some kind of benchmark for what justifies violence in this country. We thought it noble when we killed people [in the Persian Gulf] for oil that wasn’t even ours … So what’s the standard? Before we can start casting stones at Paul Hill, [John] Salvi and the others that are to come, we need to decide what our standards are going to be.” Crutcher was also an early advocate of a tactic that is well known today. He called for “guerilla legislation,” or efforts to chip away at abortion access, as a legislative companion to his harassment of abortion providers. The goal, one commentator said, was to create “an America where abortion may indeed be perfectly legal, but no one can get one.” Throughout this time, Crutcher was evidently in touch with Newman and Operation Rescue, writing a blurb for the back cover of Newman’s 1993 book “Their Blood Cries Out.” The subsequent investigations of Crutcher and his “spies for life” grew out of this work, whose goal was not to uncover the truth but to intimidate abortion providers. The goals and tactics of Daleiden and his former colleagues at Live Action, however much they call themselves “citizen journalists,” are little changed from the Mark Crutcher projects on which their work is modeled.

Troy Newman vs. Dr. Tiller

Going National

In their 2014 book “Abortion Free: Your Manual for Building a Pro-Life America One Community at a Time,” published by the far-right outlet WorldNetDaily, Newman and Sullenger offer a case study of how they ended legal abortion — for a time — in Wichita. They roundly condemn Roeder’s murder of Tiller, claiming that they were close to forcing Tiller to retire or to lose his license anyway, and that Roeder “snatched defeat from the mouth of victory.” They began to expand their activism nationally. “It was only after our Kansas project was concluded that Operation Rescue began to grow in influence and reputation through the exposure of abortionists around the nation who were breaking the law,” they wrote. “ … Our work flourished. Sometimes God has a way of moving us on through traumatic events into a new place where He wants us to be, and we were now exactly where He wanted us.” Today, Operation Rescue runs a website called AbortionDocs.org that lists the photos, addresses, and phone numbers of abortion providers, modeled on the public dossier it had put together about Tiller. In “Abortion Free,” Newman and Sullenger train their fellow activists in the methods they experimented with in California and perfected in Wichita. It essentially acts as an update of Scheidler’s 1985 “direct action” manual for a new age when protesters can no longer block the doors of clinics and when even the more mainstream segments of the movement have latched on to the strategy of ending legal abortion through chipping away at clinics’ ability to operate. Newman and Sullenger advise activists to dig up information on providers and patients in hopes of finding even the smallest infraction that could result in legal troubles for a clinic. They also detail how to conduct “sting” operations, like the one undertaken by David Daleiden, explaining that “stretching the truth” is acceptable when trying to destroy a “godless enemy.” “Abortion Free” abandons the fire and brimstone of Newman and Sullenger’s earlier work in favor of the more restrained tones of a movement that increasingly talks about “protecting women’s health” rather than avoiding God’s judgment for mass murder. But that doesn’t mean that Operation Rescue has entirely toned down its rhetoric. Shortly after “Abortion Free” was published, Newman joined with Gary Cass, a longtime ally and head of the Christian Anti-Defamation League to launch the “Abortion Free Communities Project,” which they hoped would prompt activists to use Operation Rescue’s tactics throughout the nation. Cass had tied his anti-choice activism to his anti-gay efforts, saying that “gay abortionists” are out to “destroy the fruit of heterosexuality” and contended that President Obama is “not a Christian” because he supports LGBT rights and “the Bible is very clear about homosexual acts being a very evil thing.” Newman continues to explain his strategy of targeting abortion providers as an attempt to “shut off the supply side of the abortion industry” in order to cut off “the Enemy’s ability to make war on the children.” He calls abortion a “demonic enterprise” that providers undertake for profit. He claims that God is sending “weather patterns , ” including the drought in California , as punishment for legal abortion. Of religious denominations “that approve of abortion and homosexuality and other sins,” Newman says, “I don’t want to be on the Day of Judgment, period, but I definitely don’t want to be in their shoes.”

'We Serve a Very Big God That Answers Prayers'