By Cheryl Sullenger
David Daleiden is the Director of the Center for Medical Progress, an organization that was known only to a handful of people prior to July 14, 2015, when he released the first of 10 summary videos that were part of his jaw-dropping 30-month undercover investigation into Planned Parenthood’s participation in the illegal sale of aborted baby body parts that has dramatically changed the abortion debate in America.
Recently, David was interviewed on camera by The Blaze’s Glen Beck, who posted a fascinating clip from that interview. In that clip, Beck asks David about whether he ever realized the powerful evil that with which he had embedded himself.
“At some point, you guys had to have walked out of those [meetings] just shaking and thinking, A: ‘I can’t believe the evil I just faced,’ and B: people die for stuff like this. I mean, we’re going up against evil, and very powerful evil. Did that ever hit you while you were doing these things?”
David then related his encounter with late-term abortionist Shelley Sella, an abortionist conducting the latest of abortions throughout all nine months of pregnancy who currently works at Southwestern Women’s Options in Albuquerque, New Mexico. At the time of David’s encounter with her, she was a contract abortion provider with Planned Parenthood in Concord, California.
Sella-Face
David described a meeting where he was laughing and joking with Sella after a showing of the independent film, “After Tiller.” But for a moment, their eyes locked, and he saw a change come over her.
“All of a sudden, her eyes looked really hard and mean and aggressive, and for the first time during this entire project, I felt really afraid – like an actual fear — fight or flight kind of response,” David related. “I felt very exposed, felt like she knew everything about me.”
But then her face changed again and she was back to laughing and joking with him.
“I talked to several people about that afterwards, and some people have kind of a spiritual interpretation of that event and there’s a more subtle interpretation. But on some level, we feel like that was the predator — the predator look or the predator instinct that you see in someone who is accustomed to killing people. This is a late-term abortion doctor who has terminated many, many, many big babies over the years,” Daleiden told Glenn Beck, who sat enthralled by the power of the moment.
Spiritual battle
I completely understood. For me, it was a real “Lord of the Rings” moment. I could imagine David as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Frodo laid bare before the all-searching Eye, with only the thinnest of veils keeping him from being discovered by the wicked Sauron, who was bent on the destruction of man-kind.
My faith informs me that there is a spiritual battle that interacts with our realm of reality, where angels and demons continuously fight for supremacy until the Final Day. Had David caught a glimpse of a demonic force that somehow sensed something about him for a brief moment in a similar way that Tolkien’s Ring Wraiths sensed the presence of Frodo, the Ring Bearer?
I am very familiar with this particular abortionist since she was one of three that were employed by the infamous George Tiller at his late-term abortion mill in Wichita, Kansas, who has aborted hundreds, if not thousands, of babies in the late second and third trimesters of pregnancy.
While my relationship with Sella has been more adversarial than David’s over the years, I have felt that same sense of evil, especially one day in June, 2008, when a licensed practical nurse walked into our office and unburdened her heart about her experiences working at Tiller’s abortion clinic. A story she related to us about Sella was one of those surreal moments when the evil hits home.
35-week born alive baby
Tina David was a slender older woman with short-cropped blonde hair who had worked assisting Tiller’s abortionists with the very late-term abortions for which he was so famous. But the work tormented her. She found it difficult to sleep at night. She began losing a dangerous amount of weight and ground her teeth down to the point that she required extensive dental work to correct.
Tina and I sat down in Troy Newman’s office with a digital audio recorder running. As Troy began to question her, Tina began to open up.
One day, she said, she was assisting Sella with the abortion of a 35-week baby.
“Well, my job was to hold the [woman’s] leg and count the parts, if it was in pieces,” she said. “And this was, um, maybe 35 weeks?”
“That’s a pretty big baby!” I responded.
“It was a big baby,” she affirmed. “And the baby came out and it was moving. I don’t know if it was alive or if it was nerves? I have no clue. But Dr. Sella looked up right away at me and took a utensil and stabbed it right here and twisted. And then it didn’t move anymore.”
Tina pointed to her right-side, just under the rib cage to show where there baby was stabbed.

It’s shocking to hear someone describing a murder. It’s almost like you can’t believe what you are hearing and it takes a few moments for the reality to sink in. There was no reason to doubt her story. We were also able to verify other information she gave us, giving her account of this baby’s death even more credibility.
When a 35-week baby comes out moving, that isn’t an abortion. It’s a live birth. I consulted an attorney friend of mine in California, and was advised that Troy and I had an obligation to report the matter to local law enforcement.
We turned over the raw, unedited audio file to the police. Detectives with the Wichita Police Department immediately picked up Tina and questioned her.
As much as David Daleiden reminded me of the Ring bearer, Frodo, Tina reminded me of another Tolkien character, a creature with a double-personality who was nearly consumed by darkness as Gollum, but in which there remained a nagging shred of conscience that manifested infrequently as Smeagol.
It was her “Smeagol” persona who shared with us in Troy’s office, but it was the “Gollum” part of her that was interviewed by police. Tina squirmed under questioning and recanted her ever-changing story, telling police she didn’t want to get involved. She sought to save herself from any implication in that cold-blooded murder.
There wasn’t much the police could do. Tina was an unreliable witness. The physical evidence held in the remains of the nearly full-term murder victim had been destroyed in the industrial crematorium that Tiller had installed in his clinic many years before.
Still unaccountable
I have often thought that if Pennsylvania’s late-term abortionist, Kermit Gosnell, who was convicted of first degree murder for stabbing babies born alive at his “House of Horrors” abortion mill, had owned such an incinerator, he would still be on his serial-killing spree today. It was the bodies of his victims that testified against him every bit as much as the witnesses that took the stand.
Unfortunately, Sella was never held accountable. Just months after the stabbing incident, Sella cancelled her Kansas medical license and relocated her late-term abortion practice to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where there are no laws to restrict abortion even until the day of a baby’s expected birth.
I continued to work with pro-life activists Tara and Bud Shaver, who once served as interns at our Wichita headquarters. Tara had obtained a number of 911 calls originating from Southwest Women’s Options.
One stood about above the others.

On May 12, 2011, a 911 call was placed by an employee of Southwest Women’s Options seeking emergency transport for a late-term abortion patient.
“The doctor’s concerned that we have a uterine rupture during a late-term abortion procedure. A patient with a previous C-Section. The patient’s stable at the moment, but. . .” the caller’s voice trailed off.
Documents revealed that Sella had indeed ruptured the uterus of a 26-year old patient who was 35 weeks pregnant – the same age of gestation as the baby that Sella stabbed in Wichita five years earlier — and that the clinic was ill-equipped to handle the life-threatening medical emergencies that can and do take place during risky late-term abortions.
Tara and I both filed complaints against Sella with the New Mexico Medical Board, which initially charged her with four counts of gross negligence. Medical boards rarely bring such charges if they are not positive they can prove the malfeasance. I had though we finally had Sella. She may have gotten away with that baby’s murder in Wichita, but she would not get away this time.
But unfortunately, the New Mexico Medical Board voted to absolve Sella, buying her specious argument that obstetrical standards of patient care should not be applied to late-term abortions, and that a much lower standard should be acceptable.
Today, Sella continues to conduct the latest of abortions in Albuquerque and has become famous as one of the most experienced late-term abortionists in America. According to a consent form obtained by the Shavers, the remains of babies aborted at Southwestern Women’s Options, are automatically used in research. Since the “consent” for research is buried in the same consent form for the abortion, it is doubtful many women even realize their babies are being turned into fodder for laboratory experimentation.
Changing times
Now, thanks to David Daleiden’s brave undercover journalistic study, a new day has dawned in American’s abortion wars where the public is finally confronted with the evil of child-killing in a way that has never been done before – in a way that could finally, eventually, lead to an end of the evil of abortion.
As Gandalf, another of Tolkien’s amazing characters, once said, “Dawn is ever the hope of man.”