U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly sentenced a pro-life activist on Tuesday to 57 months in prison and three years supervision for her participation in a peaceful pro-life protest at one the capital city’s most controversial abortion facilities.
Lauren Handy, 30, was one of several members of the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU), a primarily leftist organization with a pro-life streak, who initiated a “rescue and protest” at late-term abortionist Cesare Santangelo’s Washington, D.C., facility in October 2020.
“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,” Handy’s lawyers at the Thomas More Society noted.
Handy, PAAU’s director of Activism and Mutual Aid, decided to protest at Santangelo’s facility in particular after she heard him admit on an undercover video that he “would not help” a baby born alive after a botched abortion.
“My belief that was formed after watching the video was if the fetus survived the abortion attempt, they were left to die,” Handy told the court during witness testimony.
Handy was also among those who recovered a box of five dead preemie-sized babies outside of Santagelo’s facility. The discovery of the “D.C. Five” should have prompted an investigation into Santangelo’s possibly illegal abortion methods. Instead, it put Handy at risk for more scrutiny from law enforcement and pro-abortion Democrats.
Nearly two years after the October protest, Biden’s DOJ charged Handy and nine other advocates for life with allegedly violating the unconstitutional Freedom
