Anti-abortion activists claim truck driver allowed them to take a box filled with 115 fetuses

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After initially reporting on Apr. 1 about a bizarre case in Washington, D.C., where police discovered five fetuses in the home of an anti-abortion activist, now we learn that the fetuses came from a box filled with 115 fetuses that a truck driver allegedly allowed the activists to take.

The home was occupied by Lauren Handy, the director of activism for the group Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU).

RELATED STORY: Police find five fetuses in home allegedly occupied by ‘director of activism’ with pro-life group

During a news conference Tuesday led by Randall Terry, founder of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, along with Handy, PAAU founder and executive director Terrisa Bukovinac, and others, the activists claimed that a driver with Curtis Bay Medical Waste Services allowed them to take a box they would later learn was filled with 115 fetuses. 

“During the five days they were under my stewardship, the 115 victims of abortion violence were given a funeral mass for unbaptized children and 110 were given a proper burial in a private cemetery by a priest,” Handy said.

Handy and Bukovinac claim they were at the Washington Surgi-Clinic on Mar. 25 for a protest when they saw the Curtis Bay truck driver with the boxes.

“We asked him [the driver] if he knew what was in the boxes,” Bukovinac said at the news conference. “He said no. So, we told him, ‘dead babies.’”

Bukovinac says after the driver “confirmed the boxes were from Washington Surgi,” she then asked the driver if he would “get in trouble” if they “took one of these boxes.” The driver asked what they would do with them, and “Lauren said, ‘We’ll give them a proper burial and a funeral,’” Bukovinac said.

“The driver said ‘okay,’ and gestured toward the box. Lauren immediately grabbed the box off of the dolly and we brought it back to her apartment,” Bukovinac said.

Bukovinac claimed when they opened the box “in the presence of a Catholic deacon,” they found the “remains of 110, mostly first-trimester aborted children.” She says they also found another plastic bag inside the box, which they claim contained the “remains of a beautiful intact and nearly full-term baby boy.”

Bukonivac says she and Handy found three more “full-term babies” and that they “alerted D.C. homicide” and gave them the location of the five fetuses, demanding an investigation and a “proper burial for the remaining five children,” she said.

Handy, who identified herself as a “devout Catholic,” claimed that the “five children” were “advanced in their gestational age” and had suffered from “wounds” suggesting “violent federal crimes.” She says she arranged for the medical examiner to pick up “the children.”

At the time the fetuses were removed from Handy’s home, D.C. Police Executive Assistant Chief of Police Ashan M. Benedict informed reporters that the fetuses were aborted legally, according to D.C. law. “There doesn’t appear to be anything criminal about that—except for how they got into that house,” Benedict said.

Handy was indicted by a federal grand jury on Mar. 31 along with eight others after breaking into and blocking access to the entrance of a D.C. abortion clinic in Oct. 2020.

In a statement sent to The New York Times, Curtis Bay Medical Waste Services denies all of the allegations made by PAAU.

“On March 25, a Curtis Bay employee took custody of three packages from the Washington Surgery Center [Washington Surgi-Clinic] and delivered all of them to Curtis Bay’s incineration facility,” the statement reads.

Curtis Bay additionally denied that the driver handed packages over to the protesters. “Any allegations made otherwise are false,” the company’s statement asserts.

Melissa Fowler, chief program officer with the National Abortion Federation, told the Times in a statement that “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.”