When five dead infants retrieved from a Washington, D.C., abortion facility were found in anti-abortion activist Lauren Handy’s townhome, their deaths raised questions about abortion procedures. Now past the peak of abortion legality in the United States, their deaths remain relevant to current, peripheral bioethical debates.
Handy and a few colleagues from the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising obtained the children’s remains, along with 110 other aborted children, in March 2022, from a whistleblower who found the remains while working medical disposal services at Washington Surgi-Clinic in Northwest Washington, D.C., known for its late-term abortion services. Once Handy was arrested later that month, police received a tip and found the five infants in her residence. The “D.C. Five,” as they have come to be named, had wounds consistent with partial-birth abortion — a procedure federally illegal since 2003. Three years after this event, a federal investigation into the matter is underway.
The Department of Justice under former President Joe Biden declined to look into the case, instead instructing the chief medical examiner to cremate the children without an autopsy. Some of this inaction results from the written law, since abortion, with no gestational limit, is legal in the district. Officials granted the presumption that the abortions were carried out legally, rather than by the partial-birth method or by post-birth execution. Part of it, however, stems from callousness: The Biden administration did not care whether these infants were outright murdered and trashed, as political messaging on the matter was of greater importance.
This week, Attorney General Pam Bondi called the “D.C. Five” case an “ongoing investigation.” Bondi said as much at a House budget hearing, after Rep. Riley Moore (R-WV) asked whether she would “commit to working with me and this committee to conduct a full and fair investigation into the deaths of these children.”
The investigation signals a presidential administration no longer blatantly anti-life. And by now, the “D.C. Five” case has persisted long enough to share the anti-abortion space with active legislation of similarly critical content, namely, physician-assisted suicide. Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) will soon either sign, veto, or allow the state’s Medical Aid in Dying Act to pass into law. The act takes a malicious stance toward vulnerable life and contains easy loopholes for mental health qualifications. Still, it is likely to become law.
The bill seeks to settle the debate over whether people can choose not to suffer. Of course, they can already, to a degree. Yet, MAID goes further to allow people to die “on their terms,” especially when they cannot stomach other, more gruesome, traditional methods of suicide.
When they cannot decide, can we decide for them? Here, MAID advocates insist loudly that we cannot, that this degree of suffering can only be interpreted (and stopped) by the sufferer. Suicide should never be denied to the ill, then, whereas this benevolent characterization of the practice takes on an avoid-at-all-costs quality when its subjects are transgender youth. So much so that rhetoric in support of surgical mutilation and hormone treatment has for a while revolved around suicide prevention.
At the same time, the most staunch abortion advocates see through gestation-based fetal pain sensation arguments to the movement’s guiding principle that one person’s life is of more value than another. The anti-suffering autonomy argument that props up assisted suicide should be of use here, but it isn’t. If infants feel pain at least at 15 weeks old, can we decide for them that they are suffering?
TRUMP-BACKED PUSH TO REPEAL FACE ACT GAINS STEAM POST-DOBBS
Even if intellectual assent can join the fact that “personhood” exists at any point after conception, the truly abortion-rights advocate will claim that true choice trumps it. At which point, the gray areas of physician-assisted suicide become grayer.
The “D.C. Five” present a more complex case than the usual abortion ban debate, one that requires confrontation with the reality of the unborn person. In the past, these considerations have been easily ignored, backed by a willing administration. Hopefully, the real weight of these questions will now carry proper legal influence.