Print 
PDF
Police have confirmed an abortionist who appears to have illegally performed partial-birth abortions will be allowed to continue with no criminal investigation. The same week peaceful pro-lifers who staged a protest at his abortion facility were found guilty in federal court and face imprisonment.
According to the Daily Signal, the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department said Thursday they are not actively investigating abortionist Cesare Santangelo, whom pro-life activists have accused of performing gruesome abortions of viable babies. The Federalist also asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation if it was investigating Santangelo, but the agency refused to answer the question.
What's going on with this?
Be informed, not misled.
Is this administration ignoring the abortionist who murdered the babies while punishing the people who defended the babies?
What happened?
It began back in 2022. The accusations stem from pro-life activists Lauren Handy and Terrisa Bukovinac, who obtained a box of five preemie-sized babies outside Santangelo’s practice, the Washington Surgi-Clinic, in March 2022. The babies became known to pro-lifers as “The Five.”
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, a Washington D.C. federal court found five pro-life activists, including Handy, guilty of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act for their participation in an October 2020 rescue and protest at the Washington Surgi-Clinic. The pro-lifers face up to 11 years in federal prison, three years of supervised release, and fines of up to $350,000.
Lawyers from the legal group, Thomas More Society representing Handy and the other pro-life people, say the October 2020 protest was peaceful: “Some simply kneeled and prayed at Santangelo’s facility, some passed out pro-life literature and counseled abortion-minded women, and others roped and chained themselves together inside the facility.”
On Tuesday, the Metropolitan Police Department led the Daily Signal’s Mary Margaret Olohan to believe it was investigating Santangelo and his clinic in relation to the discovery of the aborted babies and the allegations that illegal partial-birth abortion techniques were used in their deaths. On Thursday evening, however, the department changed its tune.
The Signal published this:
One of these activists, Lauren Handy with the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, has said that she was motivated to stop abortions from occurring inside the clinic after she viewed an undercover video published by the pro-life group Live Action, which allegedly showed Santangelo discussing how he would allow babies to die if they were accidentally delivered during abortions.
When the Live Action investigator asked Santangelo whether the baby might “move” if “it” were born alive, the abortionist allegedly told her, “That’s why I try and sever the umbilical cord first, and we wait for that to stop pulsing, and this way the fetus is expired first, so it doesn’t.”
“Has it ever survived?” the Live Action investigator asked. Santangelo responded, “No, not here.” He added: “Usually at this point in your pregnancy, it is too early to survive. Usually, it will expire shortly after birth.”
BREAKING
— Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) August 22, 2023
Judge Kollar-Kotelly has disallowed @LiveAction’s undercover footage of late-term abortionist Cesare Santangelo admitting he would leave a baby to die if it were born alive after a failed abortion
5 pro-lifers face 11 years in prison for trying to stop this infanticide pic.twitter.com/pvdjfZxySj
Sadly, there's more:
But if it did, what would happen?” the investigator asked him. “Would I have to take it home, or like—”“I mean, technically, legally, we would be obligated to help it, you know, to survive,” he told her, according to the video. “But you know, it probably wouldn’t. It’s all in how vigorously you do things to help a fetus survive at this point.”
“When you have a pregnancy that is 23, 24 weeks … if you do everything possible to help it survive, there’s a maybe a 20%-30% chance that it would survive,” he said. “If you don’t do anything then, you know, the chances are much, much less.”
He added that “there are things you can do” to make sure the baby does not survive.
“Obviously, you’re here for a certain procedure, and if your pregnancy were—let’s say you went into labor, the membranes ruptured, and you delivered before we got to the termination of the procedure here,” he continued. “Then we would do things. We would not help it.”
“We wouldn’t intubate, let’s say,” Santangelo explained, adding that he “wouldn’t do any extra” to help the dying baby and comparing letting the baby die to letting a terminally ill person die. “Like a ‘do not resuscitate’ order.”
If the mother were in a Virginia hospital and went into labor, medical professionals would do everything possible to help her baby survive, Santangelo said. “We wouldn’t here,” he said.
"That’s happened before,” Santangelo added, according to the video. “We’ve had patients that, you know, on the second day .... they got some contractions, and they panicked, and they were in Virginia at the hospital. They went to the hospital, because they had some pain, instead of calling me.”
“And the hospital helped them to deliver,” he added. “Which was the stupidest thing they could have done … and they did everything they [inaudible] have done, which was help them to deliver."
Some context.
- The District has no laws regulating how late a baby can be aborted during pregnancy. When the babies’ bodies were originally brought to light, D.C. police shrugged off the matter.
- Ashan Benedict, the MPD’s executive assistant chief of police, told reporters in April 2022 that the babies appeared to have been aborted “in accordance with D.C. law.”
- Police have repeatedly told The Daily Signal since then that the case is still “under investigation.” Authorities will not share whether autopsies have been performed on the babies’ remains. The MPD confirmed in early August that the investigation is still open.
- But it was not until this week that MPD confirmed to The Daily Signal that Santangelo and his clinic are under investigation.
- The mayor’s office has completely stonewalled questions about the babies. Even the office of the chief medical examiner for the District of Columbia directs queries to the mayor’s office—specifically, to Dora Taylor-Lowe, who refuses to answer The Daily Signal’s requests for comment.
- It remains unclear whether autopsies have been performed on the bodies of the five babies, whose bodies were photographed by Bukovinac. ( These images are graphic and disturbing.) Some pro-lifers fear that the city may have gotten rid of them.
Takeaway
Yet, although D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser refuses to address the possibility that Santangelo was criminally aborting late-term babies in the nation’s capital, she did accuse Handy of “tampering with fetal remains” in an April 2022 letter to Republican lawmakers highlighting that Handy herself faced FACE Act charges for blocking the entrance to a D.C. abortion clinic in October 2020.
Handy’s involvement in the discovery of the babies and her participation in the October 2020 “blockade,” according to Bowser, are potentially “serious violations of federal law.”
At the time, Bukovinac said, “The FBI is targeting PAAU members because our activism challenges the property lines of and disrupts commerce for the abortion industrial complex.” She added that PAAU is “especially a problem for them because we are nonviolent and therefore our efforts and ideas are rapidly catching on.”
Thomas More Society senior counsel Martin Cannon said he and his team intend to appeal the court’s decision. “[We] will continue to defend those who fight for life against a Biden Department of Justice that seems intent on prosecuting those who decry abortion and present it as it is — the intentional killing of children in utero,” he stated.
May God forgive us.
Be Prayerful. Be Courageous. Be Engaged. Be Bold.