The pro-life activists involved in last week’s handover of five fetuses stored in a Capitol Hill apartment to District police are asking for autopsies to determine whether, as they suspect, federal partial-birth laws were broken when the abortions were conducted.
Speaking to reporters at the Hyatt Regency Washington on Tuesday, activists said the group turned the fetuses over to the Metropolitan Police Department Wednesday with hopes that tests would be conducted to determine if evidence indicated illegal late-term or live-birth abortions.
Police last week said there is no evidence that laws were broken in connection with the abortions, but that there are questions about how the pro-life activists procured and stored the five fetuses.
Ashan Benedict, executive assistant chief of police, told local media on Thursday that the abortions seemed to have been “in accordance with D.C. law [and] there doesn’t seem to be anything criminal in nature about that except for how they got into this house.”
The activists pushed back on those comments Tuesday, telling reporters they saw late gestational injuries to the bodies of the fetuses that indicated possible violations of the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act and Born-Alive Infants Protection Act.
Lauren Handy, a leader of the activist group who lives in the apartment in the 400 block of 6th Street Southeast where the fetuses were kept, became emotional as she discussed the parents of the fetuses.
“I am deeply heartbroken for these families,” the 28-year-old woman said.
A self-described “devout Catholic,” Ms. Handy was one of nine activists indicted in federal court Thursday in connection with a separate 2020 incident in which protesters are accused of storming a D.C. abortion clinic and chaining themselves to chairs.
She pleaded not guilty on Monday.
Terrisa Bukovinac, who works with Ms. Handy in the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising activist group, said Tuesday the five fetuses were among 115 provided to the group on March 25 by a driver who works for a regional medical waste services firm. The activists said they conducted funerals and buried the other 110 fetuses.
The activists said they were given the 115 fetuses outside the Washington Surgi-Clinic on F Street.
“The likelihood that some were born alive is undeniable,” Ms. Bukovinac said.
In an email to The Washington Times, an MPD spokesperson said Tuesday that police could not comment further on the specific condition of the five recovered fetuses because the case remains under “active investigation.”
• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.
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