SEATTLE (LifeSiteNews) – Attorneys with the pro-life legal nonprofit Thomas More Society have delivered a victory for pro-life investigative journalist David Daleiden in his ongoing battle with the University of Washington, reaching a settlement that will shed even more light on the university’s ongoing sale of and experimentation on fetal tissue derived from abortions.
Under the settlement, UW agreed to hand over “significant” documents pertaining to its acquisition and sale of human body parts from aborted babies (with unredacted job titles) and subsequent research and to agreements with Planned Parenthood or other abortion providers, as well as communications and manuals pertaining to related policies, reports, research, financial records, contracts, and grant applications. UW will also pay Thomas More $30,000 in legal fees.
Mark Houck, a pro-life Catholic father of 7, became the latest victim of an FBI raid and arrest on the morning of Friday September 23 — for supposed “FACE (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances) (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances) Act” violations — at his rural home as his children looked on “screaming.”
The arrest and raid stems from an altercation with a Planned Parenthood worker.
According to Mark’s wife Ryan-Marie, a “pro-abortion protester” would verbally harrass Mark’s 12-year old son — hurling vulgar and derogatory statements.
When the protestor encroached in the boy’s space, Mark defended his son. At that point, “Mark shoved him away from his child, and the guy fell back,” Ryan-Marie recounts.
The protestor was not injured, but he tried to sue Mark Houck for the assault but his case was thrown out of court in the early summer.
WE CANNOT ALLOW THE LEFT TO HARRASS PRO-LIFE ADVOCATES THIS WAY!
It’s vital to stand in solidarity with a pro-family and pro-life man being unjustly persecuted – please SIGN & SHARE our message of support now.
In case you hadn’t caught on already, the satanic Biden administration is waging war on Christians. https://t.co/E6ChpZVDYW
— Michael (X) Knowles ✊ (@michaeljknowles) September 24, 2022
The description of this arrest sounds like it took place in a totalitarian state. A tragic unraveling of Justice in America. https://t.co/e3vEID7E39
— Bishop J. Strickland (@Bishopoftyler) September 25, 2022
If convicted, Houck faces up to a maximum of 11 years in prison, three years of supervised release, and fines of up to $350,000, according to the Justice Department.
Additional conservative pro-life leaders have weighed in — this is why we need your support ASAP.
“Just in the last few days we’ve seen some pretty glaring examples of what appear to be instances of DOJ [Department of Justice] overreach. You’ve got a Catholic father of seven who formed a group designed to encourage young men to be faithful to their commitments, arrested in front of his seven children just recently. You’ve got all these instances of overreach. It’s deeply concerning to us all. These are all things we’re gonna be looking into.” — US Senator Mike Lee
Tell the Houck family that you stand by them!
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Please share this petition widely. Let’s stand in solidarity with Mark Houck and his family.
Thank you.
“There’s no ‘abortion exception’ to our nation’s public records laws, and the People have a right to know how their government is run,” said Thomas More’s vice president and senior counsel Peter Breen. “We are pleased at the successful resolution of this lawsuit by settlement. That settlement secured attorney’s fees from the UW and nearly everything that David Daleiden was seeking from the UW: thousands of pages of new documents on the buying and selling of aborted fetal tissue trafficking, including job titles and all non-personal information. These are public records of a taxpayer-funded program, and this settlement secures Mr. Daleiden’s rights to the documents he needs as a citizen journalist.”
As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, the University of Washington has for years fought in court to keep the details of its fetal tissue activities out of the public eye.
The legal battle began when Daleiden requested documents from the school’s taxpayer-funded Birth Defects Research Laboratory about trafficking in aborted fetal parts and organs. The public information request was met with a lawsuit from staff of Planned Parenthood and other abortion centers, along with researchers and others, to force heavy redaction of these government documents.
In March, the groups Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust, Pro-Life San Francisco, and Rehumanize International located and photographed a freezer at the University of Washington’s Seattle campus containing rows of bags containing aborted fetal bodies and body parts.
The sale of aborted fetal remains for research and experimentation first came to the political forefront in 2015, when Daleiden’s group Center for Medical Progress (CMP) began releasing undercover videos of meetings with Planned Parenthood and National Abortion Federation personnel detailing the practice, which set off a firestorm of controversy and a string of revelations about the abortion industry breaking multiple federal laws against profiting off human tissue, altering abortion procedures for the sake of procuring better tissue samples, and potentially even committing partial-birth abortions or infanticide; as well as video examples of abortion workers displaying callousness toward the humanity of the children their work killed.