Republican lawmakers are urging the FBI to investigate the deaths of five premature-sized babies discovered by pro-life activists in a 2022 rescue operation.
Lauren Handy and Terrisa Bukovinac recovered the bodies of the aborted children, who appeared to have been killed in partial-birth abortions, outside of a Washington, D.C., clinic. Former President Joe Biden’s justice department delayed an investigation into the deaths and instead, lawmakers said, waged war on pro-lifers.
“As Chairs of the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government and the Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance, we remain concerned about the Biden-Harris Administration’s refusal to investigate the circumstances of the case of five aborted children, also known as the D.C. Five, whose remains were allegedly discovered at the Washington Surgi-Clinic in March 2022 by a pro-life advocacy group,” Representatives Chip Roy (R., Texas) and Andy Biggs (R., Ariz.) wrote to FBI Director Kash Patel in a letter obtained by the Daily Wire.
“As we continue to conduct our investigation into the District of Columbia’s enforcement of the Partial-Birth Abortion Act and the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, serious questions remain surrounding the deaths of these children.”
In 2022, Handy and Bukovinac took one box labeled “Washington Surgi-Clinic” off of a medical waste truck, with the intention of burying the children they knew to be inside. Five of the 115 children in the box looked to be premature in size, meaning they would have been capable of living outside of the womb.
Although the clinic’s leader, Cesare Santangelo, denied performing partial-birth abortions, the clinic has somewhat of a reputation among pro-lifers for doing just that. Handy first became inspired to become a pro-life activist after she saw a video of Santangelo professing that he “would not help” babies who were born alive during an abortion (he later said that he “would call 911” but “wouldn’t do intubation or anything. . . . You let nature take its course”).
One of the “D.C. Five,” a baby boy, was found fully formed with ten fingers and toes intact. Another, a girl, was decapitated and appeared to be dismembered with a crushed skull. The D.C. medical examiner refused to perform autopsies of the five, partially at the request of Biden’s Department of Justice. Former Attorney General Merrick Garland never opened an investigation into the case.
“While MPD maintained that the unborn children were ‘aborted in accordance with the law,’ five pro-life advocates noted evidence that the children were victims of partial-birth abortions,” the lawmakers wrote. “Aborting a child through a partial-birth abortion is a crime under federal law. The Supreme Court of the United States upheld the federal ban on partial-birth abortions in 2007.”
“Despite this significant claim, both the MPD and the Biden-Harris Administration chose to ignore any potential evidence of a crime for two years. The Biden-Harris Department of Justice at one point allegedly directed the D.C. Medical Examiner to dispose of the bodies because ‘there [was] no reason to keep those babies anymore.'”
Handy, along with eight other activists, was sentenced to nearly five years in prison for a 2020 sit-in at the Washington Surgi-Clinic. In the first days of his administration, President Donald Trump pardoned Handy and multiple other pro-lifers targeted by Biden’s DOJ.