Thursday, February 8, 2024

DC Medical Examiner Told to Dispose of Baby Bodies Despite Evidence Pointing to Federal Crimes

 Thomas More Society Attorneys Call on House Judiciary Chair to Intervene and Bring Macabre Abortionist to Justice

(February 8, 2024 – Washington, DC) Five dead babies, suspected of being victims of illegal and very late term abortions, are the main subject of a letter to Congressman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) from Thomas More Society Senior Counsel Martin Cannon. Jordan, Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, is being asked to halt the scheduled destruction of these infant remains, set for February 9, 2024, and investigate the deaths as evidence of a federal crime in Washington, DC. 

Recovered by a medical waste truck driver outside the Washington Surgi-Clinic abortion business operated by Dr. Cesare Santangelo, the babies’ masticated corpses were handed over to Lauren Handy. Cannon is one of the Thomas More Society trial attorneys defending Handy against heavy-handed prosecution by the Biden Department of Justice for her attempts to stop such abortions in the Santangelo facility. The age and condition of the deceased newborns raise serious questions about whether they were legally aborted. 

In the letter to Jordan, Cannon states that the body of evidence makes it “more likely than not that some babies” at the Santangelo abortion facility are “in fact born alive and left to die.” 

Cannon’s letter to Rep. Jordan details how the medical examiner's office has had the babies for nearly two years. On February 5, 2024, the news surfaced that the examiner’s office had been told by the Biden administration that they could dispose of these infant bodies. 

With no autopsies performed on their nearly full-term carcasses and no investigation into their deaths conducted, there is no ability to conclude that the preborn children were legally aborted. 

Rather, the letter details a collection of damning indicators that strongly suggest that not only were these five babies killed in violation of federal law, but that this illegal termination of live infants continues at the Santangelo abattoir. 

Cannon offers up the following support for Jordan’s intervention:

  • Abortions done after a fetus has passed an 18-week gestation point, performed by labor induction and not dismemberment within the womb, without using a feticide to kill the child ahead of time, will result 50% of the time in “transient fetal survival,” also known as a living baby arriving outside the womb during an attempted abortion. The rate of live birth increases at even later gestational ages. [The Society of Family Planning, 2011].
  • This was confirmed separately in a 2018 study of 241 such abortions. In abortions performed on babies at 20- and 24-week gestation, with labor induction in lieu of feticide, live births occurred in 122 of them, or 50.6%. The mean survival time for these aborted babies born alive was just over half an hour, with some of these aborted newborns surviving up to 4½ hours. [Springer, et al., 2018].
  • Cesare Santangelo has acknowledged on video that he conducts abortions far beyond 18 weeks, with labor inducing drugs as opposed to dismemberment, and no feticide. Santangelo also appears to admit that live births occur.
  • Also documented on video, Santangelo confesses that if a baby he aborts is born alive, he will not assist it.
  • The federal Born Alive Infants Protection Act provides that a child born alive during an attempted abortion is a person. That child is thus entitled to all protections any other person would receive under the law. That means that such an infant is entitled to assistance from medical personnel, and failure to assist that baby is criminal.
  • Federal law prohibits partial birth abortions.
  • The five deceased babies which the medical examiner has planned to destroy all died very late term, bearing signs of live birth or partial birth abortion. One of those infants died or was killed at what is clearly more than 30-weeks gestation, well beyond the point of viability.

The five dead infants were recovered in March 2022 by Handy and Terrisa Bukovinac. These babies were boxed up with the remains of more than 115 aborted children which Handy and Bukovinac retrieved from a Curtis-Bay waste truck outside the Santangelo business. The five late term babies were promptly turned over to local law enforcement, because of the macabre indicators pointing to the likely criminal manner of their death.

Cannon informs Jordan that, “It is INCONCEIVABLE that viable children are not being born alive at the Santangelo clinic and simply left to die.”

Read the letter to Representative Jim Jordan requesting a Congressional Inquiry on Aborted Children dated February 7, 2024, by Thomas More Society Senior Counsel Martin Cannon, here.

Links to referenced sources [annotated] and photographic evidence [warning: photos may be disturbing]:

The following documents and photos are available upon request.

  • Baby photo (“Angel”)
  • Baby photo (“Hariett”)
  • Baby photo (“Holly”)
  • Baby photo (“Pheonix”)
  • Society of Family Planning - Contraception 84 (2011) 4-18, Clinical Guidelines, Labor induction abortion in the second trimester - Release date February 2011
  • Obstetrics & Gynecol. 2018 March - Fetal Survival in Second-Trimester Termination of Pregnancy Without Feticide, Stephanie Springer et al.

About Thomas More Society

Thomas More Society is a national not-for-profit law firm dedicated to restoring respect in law for life, family, and freedom. Headquartered in Chicago and with offices across the country, Thomas More Society fosters support for these causes by providing high quality pro bono legal services from local trial courts all the way up to the United States Supreme Court. For more information, please visit thomasmoresociety.org.

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