Officers in civilian clothes removed the embryos from an apartment in the southeast where one of the activists lived. DC police are still working to determine how the embryos were obtained and whether the laws were violated. Police in riot gear stormed a rally on Tuesday, removing hundreds of protesters by truck. They previously stated that they were investigating the actions of the activists as well as whether the appropriate procedures were followed for the disposal of the remains. City health officials did not respond to requests for comment. On Tuesday, 23 congressional Republicans sent a letter to DC Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) and Police Chief Robert J. Contee III urging, in addition to numerous requests, a “thorough investigation” into the five embryos Anti-abortion activists say he was found and asked for an answer by the close of Wednesday. Lauren Handy, 28, and Terrisa Bukovinac, 41, of a group called Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, spoke at a packed press conference inside a DC hotel on Tuesday. It was is supported by some key figures in the anti-abortion movement, including Randall Terry, founder of the radical group Operation Rescue. The women said on March 25 they walked to the driver of a Curtis Bay Medical Waste Services truck outside the Washington Surgi-Clinic, one of the few in the country to perform abortions later in pregnancy. The clinic, at Foggy Bottom, has not responded to repeated requests for comment. Activists said they asked the driver if he had picked up boxes from the clinic, which is one of the many medical offices in the same building. After the driver said he had, activists said, they asked what would happen to him if they took one of the boxes he had just loaded into the truck. The driver, Bukovinac said, then asked what they would do with the remains inside. After being told he would make the remains of a funeral and bury them, activists said the driver gave them a box. The box was said to contain more than 100 sets of fetal remains, a claim that police will not comment on. The medical waste service company said in a statement that on March 25, one of its employees “took three packages” from the clinic and handed them all over to the company’s incineration plant. “The Curtis Bay employee has never delivered any of these packages to PAAU or any other third party and any other allegations are false,” the statement said. In the “Client Guide to the Special Waste Management Plan”, the company states that “it is expressly prohibited under its state-issued operating license to treat certain types of waste at our controlled treatment plants”, including fetal waste. At the press conference, activists shared photos of a box with a logo for Curtis Bay Energy, the incinerator, and a bright orange “biohazard” sticker on one side and a white sticker on the other that read: “Generator : Washington Surgi Center. ” A request for comment from Curtis Bay Medical Waste Services regarding the incinerator logo photos was not immediately returned on Tuesday. Activists said they had arranged a naming ceremony, funeral and burial for more than 100 embryos at an unknown location. They said they also photographed and videotaped five embryos that appeared the largest and stored them in the refrigerator in the Handy’s Southeast apartment. He said that while the fetuses were there, he slept elsewhere. (Has moved since.) Activists say they want authorities to assess whether any of the fetuses may have been aborted in violation of federal law, which limits when a pregnant woman can have an abortion procedure known as intact dilation and extraction and extends legal rights to fetuses. surviving abortions. At the press conference, the women said they tried unsuccessfully for three days to ask a doctor to examine the fetuses before contacting the city’s medical examiner. They said they contacted a California attorney representing the Center for Medical Advancement against Abortion, who secretly recorded videos with Planned Parenthood staff. The lawyer then sent an email about the remains to a general e-mail mailbox at the medical examiner’s office and to a supervisor at the homicide unit, according to DC officials. Having been notified of the possible presence of the remains in Handy’s apartment, the police went to collect them. DC police declined to comment further on Tuesday. Local officials said the medical examiner has no plans at this time to perform an autopsy on the remains because they appear to have been disposed of under DC law. The District and the seven states do not have specific laws prohibiting abortions after a certain stage of pregnancy. The Justice Department on Tuesday declined to comment on whether it was investigating or would investigate the group’s allegation that the embryos may have been aborted in violation of federal law. DC Medical Examiner has no plans to necrops fetuses removed from abortion activist’s home, officials say In a letter to Bowser and Contee, lawmakers said “as members of Congress, we have an obligation to oversee the District of Columbia.” They said that any plan not to do autopsies “is completely unacceptable”. They also asked for fetal autopsies and asked if city officials “will commit to burying every child properly and with respect?” Jane Turner, a retired professor at St. Louis University School of Medicine and an 18-year medical examiner in St. Louis, said the autopsy “will most likely not determine if the fetuses were born alive.” Turner said that depending on how the embryos are stored, either by the post-abortion clinic or by activists, there is a risk of post-mortem infection that can cloud any resolve. Haddy was among nine people charged last week with federal civil rights charges for traveling to Washington in 2020, blocking access to a reproductive health center and streaming it to Facebook. Among the charges they face is the violation of the federal law on freedom of access to clinic entrances or the FACE law, which prohibits the physical obstruction or use of the threat of violence to intimidate or interfere with a person seeking reproductive health services. The FBI arrested Handy last Wednesday, the same day that police showed up at her apartment to retrieve the embryos. On Monday, he pleaded not guilty to federal charges. Prosecutors did not seek to arrest her. Handy and Bukovinac are long-time anti-abortion activists working together on Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising – a small, relatively new organization that says so. advocates not only against abortion but also progressive positions on race, LGBTQ rights and poverty. In early March, the two were among a group of anti-abortion activists who posed for pictures through a window in a door of a locked cold room at the University of Washington School of Medicine. The cold room contains samples of embryos with genetic abnormalities and other abnormalities donated to the school since the 1960s. They uploaded the images on social media. Handy also said in Facebook posts that she had climbed into trash cans outside clinics and posted ultrasound images she found on them. In an interview, Handy said that when she tried to obtain relics from clinics in the past, she usually found only medical pads or tissue that was not clearly embryonic. Activists said in an interview that they had not treated such extensive fetal remains until last week. Looking for someone who had experience with them, they approached Terry, who was known to hold pictures of embryos and was chained to hospital beds while in Operation Rescue. Terry, they said, instructed them – what materials to get and how to be the right “companions for the children”. Anti-abortion activist who held 5 fetuses pleads not guilty in DC case During the interview, activists shared a video of what they said they opened a box of remains in Handy’s apartment. In it, Handy appears to be lifting an embryo from the container. They had planned to publish a more complete description of how the remains were taken at Tuesday’s press conference. But on Friday, Live Action, an Arlington-based anti-abortion group with which they had shared pictures of the fetuses, acted on its own, editing and posting some of the footage from Haddy’s apartment on social media. Anti-abortion activists have long targeted the Washington Surgi-Clinic and its owner. Both were charged with medical malpractice in 2011 after a patient who had gone to the clinic to remove a dead fetus died. The case did not go to trial, court records show. Melissa Fowler, program director for the National Abortion Federation, a district-based abortion provider association, said: “The Surgi Clinic in Washington is a member of the NAF in good condition. “NAF clinical members comply with state and federal laws governing medical tissue for all health care providers to ensure that they are handled safely, appropriately and with respect.” Proponents of abortion access say they see the allegations about the fetus as a distortion of events aimed at creating food on social media at a crucial time. Abortion regulations are being repealed across the country and the US The Supreme Court ruling will be handed down in a case that legal experts say poses the most significant threat. Roe vs. Wade in a generation. Activists’ history, they say, underscores a skewed focus on later terminations in pregnancy that make up less than 1 percent of all abortions performed each year in the United States. “It is another tactic to intimidate abortion providers into patients who need this kind of care,” said Tarina Keene, …
