According to the Thomas More Society, the National Abortion Federation (NAF) has been ordered to file a response to the petition by the end of this month.
“When a case is deemed significant enough to be filed with the Supreme Court, it is customary and expected that the opposition will file a written response,” explained Peter Breen, Thomas More Society Special Counsel.
“By not doing so in this case, the National Abortion Federation tried to signal that they didn’t believe the case was worthy of a response. The Supreme Court disagreed, and ordered the National Abortion Federation to file a formal, written response.”
The NAF has been doing everything in its power to stop the release of the videos which capture abortion industry executives discussing the procurement and selling of human body parts taken from aborted fetuses. They successfully argued for a gag order before Judge William Orrick, who has a personal relationship with one of the Planned Parenthood clinics involved in the lawsuits against Daleiden.
Daleiden’s lawyers appealed the order to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals who refused to overturn Orrick’s decision. This led to the filing of a Petition for a Writ of Certiorari with the Supreme Court asking the high court to reverse the order.
“This injunction only serves to conceal from the public important and incriminating information about Planned Parenthood’s trafficking of the body parts and organs of dismembered children, children from whose intentional death they have already profited,” Breen said.
As their petition argues, no federal court has ever upheld a prior restraint like this, to conceal “speech of overwhelming public interest.”
Daleiden has labeled the court’s gag order “an unprecedented attack on the First Amendment” that is intended to conceal the misdeeds of Planned Parenthood and the NAF.
“The layers of injustice here are manifold,” added Breen. “There is injustice toward Mr. Daleiden – impeding his freedom of speech and his ability to share serious information regarding a matter of public safety and disclosing illegal activity. There is injustice to the public, who has a right to know about the criminal behavior of Planned Parenthood – which receives hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer funds and is under investigation by the United States Department of Justice. Finally, there is the grave injustice to the unborn children, whose very bodies are being sold as if they were livestock.”
Breen finds the Supreme Court’s order requiring the NAF to file a written response to be heartening.
“The gravity of the biased censorship behind this gag order is evidently not lost on the Justices who occupy the bench of the highest court in the land,” he said.
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