Pro-life activists offer $25K reward for information leading to indictment of late-term abortionist
Pro-life activists are offering a $25,000 reward for information that could lead to the indictment of a Washington, D.C., abortionist as the firestorm about the disposal practices for aborted babies at the abortion clinic continue.
The pro-life group Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising is holding demonstrations in front of government office buildings and an abortion clinic in the District in an effort to get justice for the five full-term babies believed to have been born alive before they were killed at the Washington Surgi-Clinic.
The bodies of the deceased babies were discovered inside a medical waste bin by pro-life activists Terrisa Bukovinac and Lauren Handy. The five babies were among over 100 babies' remains found inside containers as they were being loaded onto a hazardous waste truck destined for Curtis Bay Medical Waste Services in Baltimore, Maryland, for incineration.
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The protests and $25,000 reward are part of PAAU's #JusticeForTheFive campaign.
The first protest took place outside the Washington Surgi-Clinic, where Bukovinac and Handy obtained the medical waste containers filled with the remains of 110 babies aborted during the first trimester and the five full-term aborted babies. It was at this protest that the pro-life activists announced a $25,000 reward for any whistleblower willing to come forward with evidence that could lead to the indictment of Dr. Cesare Santangelo, the longtime abortionist who works at the clinic.
Bukovinac and Handy held a press conference last month detailing how they obtained the container outside the abortion clinic. At the event, they called on the D.C. Medical Examiner to perform autopsies on the aborted babies, citing concerns that they were victims of partial-birth abortions, an illegal late-term abortion procedure.
The pro-life activists asserted that the injuries sustained by one of the full-term babies marked for disposal, whom they named Harriet, “strongly imply that she was the victim of a partial-birth abortion.”
Bukovinac also launched a petition addressed to Mayor Muriel Bowser and the D.C. Medical Examiner, demanding“an autopsy and investigation into the deaths of these children, to know whether any violations of federal law have been committed by notorious late-term abortionist [Cesare] Santangelo.”
So far, the D.C. Medical Examiner’s Office has insisted that it has no intention of performing an autopsy. Bowser seems unlikely to push for an investigation, as she has told Republican lawmakers that Handy was under investigation for “extremist anti-abortion activity” and “tampering with fetal remains” by the Metropolitan Police Department and the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, offenses she characterized as “serious violations of federal law.”
Bukovinac decried Bowser’s allegations of law-breaking on the part of pro-life activists as “virtue-signaling to pro-abortion radicals.” Noting that Bowser had received an endorsement from the pro-abortion advocacy group Emily’s List, Bukovinac remarked that “It’s an election year for her and ... I think that she is just simply trying to virtue-signal to Emily’s List and to pro-abortion politicians and people within the District.”
“It was not her smartest move to taunt Congress in that way to treat these babies’ lives as if they do not matter, suggesting that somehow Lauren and I broke federal law when we have done no such thing. It’s not entirely surprising, but it definitely wasn’t her smartest move.”
Additionally, the pro-life activists asked the U.S. Department of Justice to prosecute Santangelo for violations of the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act and the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. Bukovinac brought up how undercover video footage obtained by the pro-life group Live Action documented Santangelo discussing how he does not use feticide.
Bukovinac stated that feticide is administered in most abortions conducted after 20 weeks gestation to give the unborn baby “a heart attack, which helps prevent a live birth and the excruciating pain of total dismemberment.” She cited Santangelo’s admission that he does not use feticide as well as “the advanced gestational age of these babies and their intact condition” as evidence that “the likelihood that some were born alive is undeniable.”
In an interview with The Christian Post, Bukovinac added: “We know that Cesare Santangelo has been doing abortions, elective abortions up until birth in the district for decades and when any time someone is doing late-term abortions like that, there is a concern that they might be relying on partial-birth abortions or even infanticide in order to commit some of these abortions because of the lack of oversight.”
Although the pro-life group had planned to hold a protest outside the D.C. Medical Examiner’s Office Tuesday, the leak of the draft majority opinion in the U.S. Supreme Court case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health prompted Bukovinac, Handy and other activists affiliated with PAAU to gather at the Supreme Court instead. Bukovinac told CP that the demonstration outside the D.C. Medical Examiner’s Office will instead take place on Friday.
The planned demonstration at the U.S. Department of Justice headquarters on Thursday will proceed as scheduled.
While the bulk of last month’s press conference focused on the condition the full-term aborted babies were in at the time of their discovery, pro-life activists also discussed what might have happened to the babies if they hadn't been found.
The truck that Bukovinac and Handy intercepted belonged to the biowaste company Curtis Bay Medical Waste Services. Missy Smith, one of the other pro-life activists who spoke at the press conference, noted that “Curtis Bay Energy states on their website that they burn biomedical waste to sustain the energy needs of the Baltimore area.”
“This means tragically that they have received, transferred and burned the corpses of aborted babies to make electricity for the households and businesses of the Baltimore area,” she added. In a statement to the press, Curtis Bay vehemently denied that it converts the remains of aborted babies into electricity.
“As stated in client agreements and company policy, customers like Washington Surgi-Clinic are prohibited from disposing of the fetuses and human remains via Curtis Bay Services,” the company said in a statement to local news outlet WUSA. “Curtis Bay provides its clients with medical waste bags and boxes to use in a manner that complies with applicable law, client agreements and company policy. Curtis Bay continues to fully cooperate with law enforcement.”
Reacting to the statement at the press conference, Bukovinac suggested that “It’s definitely possible that they (Curtis Bay employees) don’t know what’s in the box.” She maintained that the truck driver did not know that the box contained aborted babies and agreed to let her take the container after she told him of her plans to give the babies a proper burial.
The Curtis Bay Medical Waste Services website has a page titled “Our Process” that explains, “For more than 25 years, we have provided the safest and most secure method of medical waste disposal for our clients.” Additionally, under current company policy, “Our professionally trained and certified personnel collect your material and provide you with the proper documentation” before “we then transport your material, in full DOT compliance, to our autoclave or incineration disposal facilities.”
“We manage the largest medical waste incinerator in the United States,” the webpage adds. “Our sustainable and consistent environmental processing technology generates the lowest carbon footprint when compared to other waste processing technologies, as documented by the [Environmental Protection Agency].”
An archived version of the “Our Process” page on the Curtis Bay website, available on the internet archiving tool The Wayback Machine, looked slightly different. After highlighting its management of “the largest medical waste incinerator in the US,” Curtis Bay described itself as “the only facility in the Northeast Region that utilizes Waste-to-Energy incineration to safely convert infectious/biomedical waste and non-hazardous pharmaceuticals into useful energy.” From there, the company discussed its carbon footprint.
The archived version of the “Our Process” page reflects the way the page looked on July 17, 2021, nearly nine months before the news about the container full of aborted babies broke. LifeSiteNews, which did a report on last month’s press conference, maintained that the website looked as it did in July of last year when it was compiling the story.
In an interview with CP, Handy explained that “pro-lifers have been protesting Curtis Bay since as far back as 2017,” adding: “This isn’t the first time pro-lifers have been on Curtis Bay’s radar.” Handy said the previous protests stemmed from Project Weak Link, where pro-lifers sought to draw attention to “medical waste companies that service abortion facilities.”
Bukovinac said the changes made to Curtis Bay's website make it “pretty obvious that they have something to hide” because “we opened a box that was destined for their facility that definitely had fetal remains inside the box and there were several changes made to their website right after that discovery. So to me, it indicates that they have something to hide.”
The recent discovery of aborted babies marked for disposal by Washington Surgi-Clinic is not the first time the abortion clinic has garnered attention within the pro-life movement. The website Abortion Docs, a project of the pro-life organization Operation Rescue, revealed that Washington Surgi-Clinic and Santangelo were defendants in a wrongful death lawsuit alleging that a dilation and extraction abortion performed on a woman whose baby died naturally in the womb resulted in her death.
The lawsuit asserted that the defendants, including Washington Surgi-Clinic and Santangelo, were “negligent in their care.” Specifically, it claimed that defendants “failed to make proper diagnoses; failed to carry out the proper medical procedures; failed to administer appropriate and proper treatment; failed to make proper differential diagnoses; and failed to advise” the victim of “the risks to which she was particularly susceptible.” According to Abortion Docs, the case was “settled out of court for unknown amount.”
Additionally, a 2017 undercover phone call to Washington Surgi-Clinic made by the pro-life group Priests for Life in conjunction with Abortion Free New Mexico included audio of an employee at the abortion clinic agreeing to schedule an abortion on a baby at 26 weeks gestation for a fee between $6,200 and $7,200.
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
