WARNING: Graphic content.
Washington: It was the tip-off that led to a gruesome discovery: five aborted fetuses found in the home of a pro-life activist a few kilometres from the White House.
But while police had raided the apartment of 28-year-old Lauren Handy last week, mystery surrounded the grim finding until key questions were addressed: where did these fetuses come from, and why were they in her possession in the first place?
The abortion debate is heating up in America as the courts weigh up whether to restrict access to servicesCredit:AP
The bizarre case has made headlines across the US and is the latest development in one of the longest-standing battles in American politics: the constitutional right of women to have an abortion.
And it was Handy and fellow pro-life activist Terrisa Bukovinac who now say they were responsible for notifying authorities about the fetuses, after “recovering” 115 of them from a medical waste truck parked outside an abortion clinic in Washington.
In a confronting press conference on Wednesday – in which journalists were shown a highly graphic video purporting to show the fetuses being intercepted and later unpacked in Handy’s home – the pair explained how they had gone to the Washington Surgi-Clinic on March 25. The abortion service performs terminations up to 27 weeks of pregnancy.
Anti-abortion activists Terrisa Bukovinac and Lauren Handy holding up the names they had given to 110 aborted fetuses they say they “recovered” from a waste truck in Washington last week.Credit:Farrah Tomazin
After seeing a Curtis Bay Medical Waste Service truck outside, they claim they approached the driver as he was about to load two large boxes displaying biohazard symbols onto his vehicle, and asked him if he knew what the boxes contained.
“After he said no, we told him,” Bukovinac said. “Dead babies.”
The women, from pro-life group Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, claim they managed to convince the “visibly shaken” driver to give them one of the boxes so they could give the fetuses a proper funeral.
A Catholic priest then helped them bury 110 of the fetuses in an undisclosed cemetery, they told reporters, while five of them, which they believed were near full gestation, were kept in Handy’s apartment until March 30, when the pair’s lawyers called police to collect them after they had tried unsuccessfully to find a private pathologist to examine them.
The activists claim the abortions were in breach of federal laws prohibiting certain termination methods from being used after 12 weeks.
However, critics reject this and point to the incident as the latest example of the lengths that pro-lifers will go to in a bid to thwart clinics from giving women the pregnancy services they seek.
The Washington medical examiner’s office has, so far, declined to perform any autopsies on the fetuses. Ashan Benedict, the Metropolitan Police Department’s executive assistant chief of police, told reporters last week that the fetuses appeared to have been aborted “in accordance with DC law”. On Wednesday police said the case “remains under active investigation”.
But some fear that such events could become more frequent in coming months, as more states – and potentially the US Supreme Court – move to restrict access to abortion services across America.
“Anti-abortion individuals and groups are increasingly resorting to extreme and illegal antics to attempt to intimidate clinic workers and patients, and stop them from seeking or providing abortion care,” said a spokesperson from Surgi-Clinic, who also rejected the activists’ claims that its procedures did not comply with federal and state laws.
“Attacks like this one are fuelled by the steady rise in anti-abortion legislation across the country. It is more imperative than ever that abortion providers have the security they need to deliver essential health care to our communities.”
The conservative-dominated Supreme Court will soon rule on a case that could effectively wind back Roe Vs Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that grants women in America the constitutional right to an abortion.
The court’s decision centres on a Mississippi law that currently bans abortions after 15 weeks. If the ban is upheld, or if Roe v Wade is overturned altogether, it is expected that abortion could quickly become illegal in as much as half the country.
But even with months to go before the court’s mid-year decision, research suggests that 2022 is already on track to become the worst year for abortion rights in the US.
According to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks reproductive health policy, at least 529 abortion restrictions had been introduced in bills across 41 states by the end of last month. Five states – Arizona, Idaho, Indiana, South Dakota, and Wyoming – have gone even further by enacting their restrictions.
On Monday, another Republican-led state was added to the list, when Oklahoma approved a bill that would make performing an abortion a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison, or a maximum fine of $US100,000 ($132,000) or both.
The bill passed without any debate in the House of Representatives, making exceptions only for an abortion performed to save the life of the mother, but not in cases of rape or incest. Multiple other states have also passed bills in recent weeks banning abortions at 15 weeks of pregnancy, including Florida, Kentucky and Arizona.
Washington, DC, on the other hand, is one of the few places that do not have specific laws prohibiting abortion after a certain point in pregnancy, making facilities such as the Washington Surgi-Clinic a major target of protests.
Handy, along with eight other pro-lifers, was last week indicted for illegally blocking access to a Washington abortion clinic in October 2020.
Meanwhile, her latest bout of activism has been rejected by Curtis Bay Medical Waste Service, which denied any of its employees would have handed over a box of fetuses, saying that “any allegations made otherwise are false”.
Nonetheless, the pair remained defiant.
“Pro-life Americans will not stay silent in the face of such aggressive and barbarous violence,” said Bukovinac.
“We believe that it is the right of these victims to have their full stories told.”
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