Fetus theft

An anti-abortion group that is facing previous federal charges said it took 115 fetuses from a medical waste company and buried 110 of them at an undisclosed location.

Washington, D.C., police, which originally said it found five fetuses in one of the group members' apartments, is continuing to investigate the case.

At a news conference Tuesday, two members of Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, Terrisa Bukovinac and Lauren Handy, said they got the fetal remains from a medical waste company employee who gave them the box from his truck.

[...]

Curtis Bay Medical Waste Services told WUSA9 that it does not transport fetal remains and denied that any package was handed over to the anti-abortion group.

Several members of the anti-abortion group face federal charges from 2020, when they protested at an abortion clinic. They were charged with conspiracy against rights and violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act.

  NPR

So, your first question is, "What were they planning to do with those five?" That's mine, anyway.

And my second is, who will be the first Congressperson to pretend outrage and come to this group's defense?

Handy, the director of activism at the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising group, says she contacted the Washington, D.C., police department and asked it to collect five fetuses from her home. Handy and her colleague, PAAU founder Terrisa Bukovinac, claimed the remains were evidence that a local clinic was performing illegal abortions and asked the police to investigate. But the stunt appears to have backfired, and now the police are investigating just how the remains ended up in a D.C. residency.

[...]

Handy said she grabbed the box, which she describes as heavy, and the size of a large moving box, and carried it to their car. “I started hyperventilating, and I was panicking because I couldn’t believe this was really happening,” she says.

The duo on Tuesday attempted to back up their claims at a news conference. There, they screened a video that contained a still photo of a box labeled Curtis Bay Energy next to a truck with a Curtis Bay Medical Waste logo on the side. The video also contained a clip of the pair opening what appears to be the same box. In the video, the box contains dozens of medical containers, each containing what the activists say are fetal remains from the clinics’ abortions.

“We removed 115 unborn children from the bag,” Bukovinac tells Rolling Stone, claiming five sets of fetal remains were more developed than the rest. “There were five much larger containers.” The video screened Tuesday appears to show a fetus with a face and limbs. The activists assigned the fetus the name of “Christopher” and say the fetus’ developmental stage is evidence that the clinic is violating abortion laws.

  Rolling Stone

Unborn children are not children.

Since seizing the fetuses from Handy’s residence, the police have stated the fetuses appear to have been aborted “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,” according to The Washington Post.

[...]

D.C. law does not specifically prohibit abortions after a certain week of pregnancy. Planned Parenthood in D.C. offers in-clinic abortions up to 19 weeks, according to its website. Washington Surgi-Clinic’s website says it offers abortions up to “27 plus weeks.”

[...]

As bizarre and disturbing as it was for the activists to — in their telling — steal fetal remains from outside a clinic and take them home, what they claim happened next is equally strange.

Handy and Bukovinac say they kept the five largest fetuses at Handy’s apartment, in the refrigerator, for five days. She and Bukovinac both take pains to note that Handy did not sleep in the apartment while the fetuses were there.

Why that would matter I cannot say.

So far, [Handy] has not been charged for, in her telling, taking home a large box of fetal remains from outside an abortion clinic, but she has faced legal trouble before: She was indicted last week on federal charges for blockading a D.C. abortion clinic in 2020.

So this isn't going to help her position in court.

She and Bukovinac say they had a Catholic priest perform funeral rites and naming ceremony for all of the fetuses. Of the 110 smaller sets of remains the activists claim they took, they will only say they have been buried in a cemetery by a Catholic priest. At the press conference, they said they want to get a tombstone engraved with the 110 names they gave the fetuses before releasing further information about what they’ve done.

What last name did they give them, I wonder.

As days passed and they were unable to find a medical professional willing to examine the five remaining fetuses, Bukovinac says they decided they needed to contact the authorities. “The babies were in some kind of formaldehyde solution, but we didn’t know how long that would hold, or if her refrigerator was cold enough or whatever,” she says.

Ghouls.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.