Lauren Handy is the Director of Activism for a group called Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising. She’s a fanatic. She is currently under investigation for federal civil rights offenses after blocking access to a reproductive health center, a terribly common tactic used by anti-choicers — it’s nice to see that in some places these people are being prosecuted. As part of the investigation, Handy’s home was raided, where an unpleasant surprise was uncovered.
DC Police discovered five fetuses at the home of an anti-abortion activist in Capitol Hill on Wednesday, the department has confirmed to WUSA9.
Officers responded shortly after noon to a home on the 400 block of 6th Street SE to investigate a tip about potential bio-hazard material in the residence. Once inside, they located the fetuses. The remains were collected by the D.C. Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
The home was occupied by Lauren Handy, an anti-abortion activist who was indicted along with nine others Wednesday by a federal grand jury. Handy is accused of felony conspiracy against rights for a blockade inside a D.C. abortion clinic in October 2020.
WUSA9’s camera was outside as DC Police homicide and forensic services detectives took evidence out in red biohazard bags and coolers from the rowhouse’s basement.
Two questions: where did they get the fetuses, and why? They were either rifling through the organic waste at a hospital or clinic, or they had an insider who was stealing such material. Both are illegal, and are going to lead to more people getting fired.
But why? These activists rely entirely on shock tactics to trigger disgust in citizens…but everything that is a product of surgical procedures in hospitals is going to be repulsive to ordinary people. Cancer surgery is going to produce blood and bits of excised material that no one in their right mind is going to want on display in their home, and likewise for any necessary health procedure.
You know what’s grosser than flaunting surgical byproducts in public? Being a sensationalistic professional liar who wants to make women suffer.
Or they were hypocritically performing home abortions themselves. Maybe even on themselves.
^This.
I would bet money that every last one is hers. Forced birthers don’t want anyone else to get an abortion, but will excuse it if it’s for them or their immediate family because they’re “not like those other sl-ts”.
I remember reading an article about it years ago. It really highlighted the hypocrisy of the forced birther movement.
Found a link to the original article, if you want to read it:
https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2019/5/15/1857976/–The-Only-Moral-Abortion-is-My-Abortion-an-article-by-Joyce-Arthur
Since these people consider fetuses to be people, as they tell us over and over again, that’s not medical waste the police found. THOSE ARE DEAD BODIES. By their own reckoning. Five of them. Count ’em, five.
But I’m sure she has a good explanation, right? Right?
We know they like to use photos of aborted fetuses for the shock value in their protests. My guess is she intended to parade them around in some fashion–not exactly respectful treatment of the remains of what they consider to be dead human beings. Might as well hook them up to machines that make them dance.
But anti-choicers just care so much for the babies…
Maybe she was keeping them so she could somehow force their original bearers to pay for full funerals and burials for each of them. That is one of their latest tactics: proposing laws that require aborted (or at least miscarried) fetuses to be given full funerals and burials just like children who die after being born.
I’m going with the using/medical-waste-for-gross-out-propaganda theory myself. As much as I’d appreciate the right-wing hypocrisy of fetus fetishists performing clandestine abortions, shaving with Occam’s Razor is the best bet.
I vaguely recall seeing a documentary on TV about knee replacement surgery at some point in the 80’s. I was a child so I don’t really remember when exactly. But I do recall them saying at one point that usually they wouldn’t show as much of the surgery as they did, but they got approval to show more than anyone had previously. I remember some things struck me as disturbing. Some things you’d seein any surgery but also, the doctors had to expend considerable effort to break the bone. That part was viewed from the side with no gory bits in evidence but it still made me feel a bit queasy.
And yet for all that, at the end of it the people who had the surgeries and had some time to recover were saying how amazing they felt. They got to walk again without feeling debilitating pain. It really made a difference in their lives.
For years now this has been my go-to for explaining away the freaks who like to parade about with fetal images. Any surgery has elements the average person won’t want to think about because any surgery involves the idea that we are made of parts. And that’s not a comfortable realization. But it’s true. Internal medical procedures of all types can have disturbing element yet we do them anyway.
Because think of how ridiculous and awful it would be to demand there be no more knee surgeries just because it bothers you? All those elderly people condemned to hobble about painfully just to satisfy your meaningless objections. If you can pull that off, you have some idea of what the anti-abortion crowd really thinks. They certainly aren’t thinking of the children. If they were, they’d be making funds to reduce the cost of birth and promoting adoption services. They don’t do any of that because it’s all a con game.
When I had a golf-ball sized cyst carved out of my back a few years ago under local anesthetic, the doctor and I sliced it up to see what was inside: blood and pus and black necrotic tissue, a fibrous mesh with goo leaking out of it, looking like a diseased meatball. I thought it was nifty, but I don’t think most people could have seen it without upchucking. But then, I’m weird.
I’m not weird enough that I’d want to take it home with me, though.
They were going to find their fetuses when they “discovered the horrifying truth!” during a “FreedomLife” raid/attack on an unsuspecting local generic health clinic that offered “women’s services”, which is merely code for Abortion. Everybody knows…
I’m tempted to start listening to Christian radio again just to see if they will run with this story like they did with the Kermit Gosnell one in Philadelphia. Something tells me the anti-choice crowd will ignore this revolting discovery and quietly shove Lauren Handy down the memory hole.
“Or they were hypocritically performing home abortions themselves. Maybe even on themselves.”
“They were performing lobotomies on themselves and the knife slipped”
RWers got them some weird ass hobbies.
I think monkeysea @9 got their plans right.
She’s got a real Joker vibe going with that red tape on her mouth. “Steal a few fetuses and everybody loses their minds.”
Back when I was in college, the local campus x-tian club would put on a display in the quad around the anniversary of Roe v. Wade every year. Nothing like walking to class surrounded by posters of aborted fetuses. Grotesque.
The clinic that she’s charged with blocking the access to was invaded by her and some co-conspirators and held for a number of hours. If I were to hazard a guess, she likely stole the remains from that clinic when the opportunity presented itself.
I’m sure that in her delusional mind, she thinks that hiding the fetal remains in coolers in her home was a decent and proper burial or that she was awaiting the need for a diaper change, save that when asked by the press what was in the coolers, she made comments that it would freak people out once known.
I saw it when the story broke, with the original local news URL.
@PZ, I dunno, I’d probably want to take a fixed, prepared slide home with me.
@Snarki, child of Loki, no knives involved. They were using tablespoons.
@ 15
I’m going to take a guess that the “aborted” fetuses were likely pictures of stillbirths or miscarriages.
Reproductive rights counter-demonstrators need to start making huge posters of excised appendices and tumors and knee replacement surgeries to wave in the forced-birthers’ faces.
@17
Probably right because most abortions happen before the fetus is even visible to the human eye. Partial birth abortions are, and as long as reproductive rights are intact, will remain very rare. These maniacs can’t wrap their heads around the fact that birth control and contraception REDUCE abortions.
Ray Ceeya@19
Or… maybe they understand that perfectly well and look at unintended pregnancy and its complications as a “punishment.” If there was a 100% effective, universally adopted form of contraception, they’d be freaking out over what they perceive as a lack of consequences ordained by God.
@20 Paul
That concept is completely alien to me. It sounds like the “Sex only for procreation” argument. Even animals have sex for fun. If sex was just for procreation, why did he make it feel so good?
Ray Ceeya @ #21 — “Sex only for procreation” is exactly their attitude. If you sin, then you must accept the consequences. The argument about animals won’t make it with them, either, because humans aren’t animals.
@22 Then why did “God” make it so much fun and feel so good? Sex with a loving partner is literally the best feeling in the whole world. Wouldn’t a logical god have made it more like a drug that followed the high with a massive low instead of cozy happy cuddles?
Ray Ceeya @ #23 — “Wouldn’t a logical god…” Gods are not logical. Neither are the humans who created the gods. Like humans, some gods are quite hedonistic. Unfortunately, the gods that dominate a good part of the world today are anti-hedonists.
@24
Then logically, gods don’t exist.
“Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes like this, or he doesn’t care to, or he doesn’t exist. God is either impotent, evil, or imaginary.”
@ ^ Ray Ceeya : Why not all three? An imaginary impotent and evil god? I reckon two out of three (impotent and evil albeit also imaginary) is certainly possible. Of course one out of those three is also an alternative – i.e. evil or impotent or imaginary – so, yes. In reality I think all three is the case for the XN god based on everything we know about it and its followers actions. Although taken on its own accounts it wa sable to get it up once albeit onan unconsenting partner… who only found out about her impregnation afterwards.
The “Virgin” Mary being the one imregnated mind you -not Onan who did something else more natural and got murdered for it because ..jealous god?
@26
That’s just Q from Star Trek TNG.
Damn it. Futurama was right! Star Trek is the one true faith!
Star Trek is a damn sight more consistent and believable than the Bible. At least I think that’s what the prophets are trying to tell us in the Book of Deep Space Nine.
@ 28. Ray Ceeya : If memory serves didn’t Q ask Janeway for consent when it came to creating another godlike entity?
Checks and finds ..
Q was rude & presumptuous as F but did actually ask which is more than the Christian god did so I gather.
Admittedly Q did often torture and abuse other lifeforms without their permission so ..yeah.Absolute power leads to absolute .. (insert own words of choice here.)
@9 monkeysea
Yeah.. Since these people like to lie about what fetuses are/look like… I have the disturbing thought in my mind that, for these to be “useful” tools for them they would have had to bribe/find allies in hospitals, doing emergency surgery, to save someone’s life, or gotten hold of ones that where still born, somehow. That their “props”, and that has to be what this nut intended them to be, where “advanced enough”, in order to be useful, to push their lies and falsehoods. And.. that is just… a thousand times sicker. Because, we know damn well she, and who ever helped her, couldn’t have “found” them, if they where actually useful to promote such BS, in a “clinic”, where they almost certainly wouldn’t be dealing with anything remotely “human looking”.
Kagehi@32 You reminded me of one of the creepiest and weirdest things I’ve seen for sale on the Internet. I had to look it up but I found it pretty fast. It’s basically inaccurate representations of fetuses done in resin with baby clothes and little bobble hats.
Uh… WTAF? Who would buy this?
me@33 OK, let me backpedal slightly. If someone is grieving over a miscarriage, and these dolls somehow give them solace, it is wrong for me to judge. But they are certainly not a product I could imagine buying and I have a lot of trouble understanding the mindset of the artist.
People don’t believe me when I tell them that Rick Santorum brought home the fetus after his wife miscarried to show it to the children. Does he know that Republicans will eventually want a murder investigation after a miscarriage?
dstatton@35 Really? They don’t? All I need to believe it is to say “Rick Freaking Santorum” and the rest falls into place.
OK, OK, we’re fact people here, so in the interest of verification, I also googled it.
Your use of “show” actually downplays what happened.
Santorum’s method of grieving is his own business. Foisting it on his children… well… I’ll just stop there. He has probably done harm in other ways and I am more concerned with the public harm he did as a senator.
Just read in WaPo that authorities have declined to do autopsies on the fetuses at this time. Apparently, the anti-abortion folks want to accuse the clinic of performing illegal abortions, that is, procedures that resulted in live birth. That, and perform funerals.
-GerryL
Clearly, Cartman paid her to steal fetuses for him so he could sell stem cells for jacked-up prices.
The BS about finding fetuses that had fallen off trucks never convinced me.