California AG in baby parts case

Closing arguments filed by the California attorney general for the criminal preliminary hearing of pro-life journalists David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt signal the state considers that infanticide is not a crime in the context of abortion, says one of Daleiden’s lawyers.

For abortion advocates, birth has been “the defining landmark,” he told LifeSiteNews. “One moment the fetus is zero, the next moment it’s a person in the eyes of the law, entitled to due process and constitutional protection. Yet they blur that line here.”

Center for Medical Progress project lead David Daleiden and journalist Sandra Merritt are charged with 14 felony counts of taping confidential conversations without consent in connection with the undercover videos CMP released in 2015 exposing Planned Parenthood trafficking in aborted baby body parts.

A  brief submitted by Brentford Ferreira outlined Daleiden’s testimony that he believed that Planned Parenthood abortionists were, among other crimes, performing partial-birth abortions and altering the abortion procedure to obtain more intact organs, and that babies born alive as a result of these abortion methods were killed through organ-harvesting.

But the prosecution appeared to argue that killing a “fetus” born alive during an abortion is not infanticide.

They cited People v. Dennis (1998), which observes “that a fetus is not a ‘human being’ or a ‘person’ within the meaning of the murder statute — or any other Penal Code provision such as manslaughter, vehicular manslaughter, or section 633.5 for that matter — unless expressly so provided by the Legislature.”

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