After the remains of full-term aborted babies were recovered at an abortion clinic before being incinerated as medical waste, pro-life activists are demanding that the Department of Justice take action against the abortionist they believe committed the illegal acts.
Terrisa Bukovinac, the founder of Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, and Randall Terry, the founder of the pro-life group Operation Rescue, hosted a press conference in Washington, D.C., Tuesday to discuss Bukovinac’s discovery of full-term aborted babies inside a biohazard box marked as medical waste that was to be incinerated and converted into electricity. Bukovinac came across the box while protesting outside Washington Surgi-Clinic, an abortion clinic in the nation’s capital.
“On Friday, March 25, the Day of the Unborn Child, Lauren Handy and I went to Washington Surgi Center to engage in anti-abortion advocacy. Upon arrival, we saw a truck labeled Curtis Bay Medical Waste Services parked outside,” she recalled. “We approached the driver, who was about to load two large boxes with biohazard symbols onto his truck.”
While the driver indicated that he didn’t know what was inside the boxes, Bukovinac explained to him that they contained “dead babies.” The driver agreed to let the pro-life activists take one of the boxes after they told him their plans to give the aborted babies “a proper burial and a funeral.” Upon opening the box at Handy’s apartment, the pro-life activists discovered “110 mostly first-trimester aborted children” and a “clear plastic bag with five more containers, one much bigger than the remaining four.”
Bukovinac said one of the buckets contained “a beautiful intact and nearly full-term baby boy whom we named Christopher X.” She described the discovery of the remains of the full-term babies as “the most devastating and soul-crushing experience of our lives.”
As they opened the remaining containers they found “four more babies with a range of injuries, including [a] fully intact girl we named Harriet who had one eye open, an incision in the back of her neck, her brain suctioned out and her skull crushed.” The pro-life activists found two additional babies they named Holly and Angel, who “were severely dismembered,” and a fifth baby, Phoenix, who “was whole and still inside the amniotic sac.”
Bukovinac noted that in most abortions conducted after 20 weeks gestation, doctors administer feticide to give the unborn baby a “heart attack, which helps prevent a live birth and the excruciating pain of total dismemberment.” She discussed how in 2013, undercover footage captured by the pro-life group Live Action showed Dr. Cesare Santangelo, the “sole abortionist on staff for decades at Washington Surgi, admitting that he does not use feticide.”
“Because of this admission and the advanced gestational ages of these babies and their intact condition, the likelihood that some were born alive is undeniable,” she maintained. “The injuries sustained by Harriet strongly imply she was the victim of a partial-birth abortion.”
Bukovinac and Handy alerted the District’s Police Homicide Unit about the five larger babies and asked for an “investigation into their deaths.” Terry stressed that “we did not want these babies to go to the D.C. police” because “they should have gone to the federal government, they should have gone to the DOJ or to the FBI. However, after the pro-life activists were unable to find an independent doctor to conduct an autopsy, they elected to turn the unborn babies over to the police.
“We are demanding that the D.C. police conduct a full investigation into the deaths of these babies, including thorough autopsies. We demand that the U.S. Department of Justice prosecute Santangelo for violations of the Born Alive Infant Protection Act and the Partial Birth Abortion [Ban] Act, and we’re demanding it now.”
