Lauren Handy | |
|---|---|
 Lauren Handy protesting capital punishment in Washington, D.C. | |
| Born | November 16, 1993 |
| Nationality | American |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Occupation | Anti-abortion activist |
| Conviction(s) | Violation of Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (18 U.S.C. § 248) |
| Criminal penalty | 57 months in prison; 3 years of supervised release |
Lauren Handy (born November 16, 1993) is an American consistent life ethic activist.
Handy grew up as a Southern Baptist. [1] Her father is a painter. [1] She was molested as a child by a non-family member. [1]
She attended Central Virginia Community College with the intent of working in a museum as an art historian. [1] [2] While there, she was both pro-life and agnostic. [2] A student at nearby Liberty University invited her to go sidewalk counseling. [2] Handy was moved by the experience of seeing women walking into the abortion facility to have abortions, and started to attend church several days a week. [2] Six weeks later she skipped her final exams, dropped out of school, sold all her belongings, and moved to California to become a full-time activist with Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust. [1] [2]
She has lived with several congregations of the Missionaries of Charity, including one in Haiti, where she worked in a hospice. [1] [2]
Handy is an anarcho-mutualist. [3]
In 2017, Handy founded Mercy Missions, a mutual aid organization. [3] Mercy Missions helps families and mothers in crisis pregnancies and provides survival aid for the homeless. [3]
Handy is currently the Director of Activism for the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising. [3] [4]
Handy has been involved with a number of activist organizations. [3] Handy has been in a leadership role of the Red Rose Rescue movement since its founding. [3] As a sidewalk counselor, Handy employs an LGBT+ inclusive message and has been to more than 100 abortion facilities in more than 32 states. [3] [2] She sometimes will surreptitiously enter a facility, leave literature about alternatives inside, and then leave. [1] As she believes abortion is an act of violence, and because she wants to interrupt the cycle of violence, Handy employs non-violent principles and tactics. [1]
Handy began entering abortion facilities to speak to pregnant women in 2013. [2] She stands outside a Washington, D.C., Planned Parenthood facility three or four times a week, telling people that "there is free help available for you and your family." [1] She claims to have helped over 800 families chose to give birth rather than have an abortion. [3] [2] One abortionist sued Handy for loss of revenue after she helped 12 women find the resources they needed and the women decided not to have abortions. [2]
Handy has discovered the bodies of aborted children in dumpsters behind abortion facilities and given them proper burials. [1] [2]
She has been arrested more than 30 times during her activism. [3] [2] Charges are often dropped, or sentences suspended. [2] She purposely does not earn wages, so her wages cannot be garnished in a lawsuit. [1] She supports herself with donations and occasional graphic design jobs. [1]
Handy was convicted of trespassing and resisting arrest for her actions at a "pink rose rescue" in Flint, Michigan. [4] She spent four days in jail. [1]
On October 22, 2020, Handy and four others from the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising blocked access to a facility that performs abortions in Washington, D.C. [1] [5] [6] Handy made an appointment at the facility under a fake name. [5] [6] Once inside, she and the other protesters used their bodies, chains, ropes, and furniture to block the doors. [5] [6] The protest was livestreamed on Facebook. [5]
Handy and several others were convicted of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. [5] [7] On May 14, 2024, she was sentenced to 57 months in prison and three years of supervised release. [8]
In 2021, Handy conducted a pink rose rescue at an Alexandria, Virginia, abortion facility. [4] During the rescue, she and five others entered the waiting room of the facility and handed pink roses to women who were scheduled to undergo abortions. [4] Along with the roses, the women were given information on resources available to them and their children, and information on alternatives to abortion. [4] Protesters will sometimes go limp, forcing police officers to lift their bodies onto stretchers to remove them. [1]
According to the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, five women chose not to have abortions as a result of the pink rose rescue. [4] Handy was sentenced to 30 days in prison for trespassing. [4]
On March 25, 2022, Handy and Terrisa Bukovinac were sidewalk counseling outside of Washington Surgi-Clinic in D.C. when they saw a medical waste disposal company's truck parked outside. [1] [2] They approached the driver and asked if they could give the aborted children inside the boxes a “proper funeral”. [2] They took the box back to Handy's apartment and, with a deacon present, opened the box with a video camera running. [2]
Inside the box they discovered 115 aborted fetuses, including five they believed were old enough to be viable outside of the womb. [2] [5] This would mean the facility violated the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act and the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act. [9] Handy and Bukovinac suspected one fetus may have been born alive and left to die outside the womb, and another was a partial-birth abortion. [2] They put what they believed to be the older children into the refrigerator at Handy's house while they tried to find a pathologist, and Handy temporarily moved in with Bukovinac. [2] They then contacted lawyers, priests, and other experts to determine how they should proceed. [1]
Two days later, a Catholic priest said a funeral Mass for the 115 fetuses; each was given a name that was read at the Mass. [2] [5] The bodies were then buried in a cemetery. [2]
The pair then hired a lawyer to contact the D.C. Medical Examiner. [1] [2] [5] On March 29, they asked for autopsies to be performed and homicide investigations opened. [2] That evening, Handy left her apartment door unlocked so that police could enter. [1] [2] On the morning of March 30, when Handy returned to her apartment, she was met by FBI agents and arrested. [2] Bukovinac then entered Handy's apartment and found the bodies still there. [2] The fetuses were later removed from the apartment with Bukovinac present. [5] [2]
Handy was never charged with a crime in relation to the incident, [5] [6] but her landlord terminated her lease. [2]
Handy is a queer convert to Catholicism. [2] [3] [4] As the Catholic Church teaches that sexual acts outside of marriage are sinful, she remains celibate. [1]
Abortion in Sweden was first legislated by the Abortion Act of 1938. This stated that an abortion could be legally performed in Sweden upon medical, humanitarian, or eugenical grounds. That is, if the pregnancy constituted a serious threat to the woman's life, if she had been impregnated by rape, or if there was a considerable chance that any serious condition might be inherited by her child, she could request an abortion. The law was later augmented in 1946 to include socio-medical grounds and again in 1963 to include the risk of serious fetal damage. A committee investigated whether these conditions were met in each individual case and, as a result of this prolonged process, abortion was often not granted until the middle of the second trimester. As such, a new law was created in 1974, stating that the choice of an abortion is entirely up to the woman until the end of the 18th week.
An abortion clinic or abortion provider is a medical facility that provides abortions. Such clinics may be public medical centers, private medical practices or nonprofit organizations such as Planned Parenthood.
Anti-abortion violence is violence committed against individuals and organizations that perform abortions or provide abortion counseling. Incidents of violence have included destruction of property, including vandalism; crimes against people, including kidnapping, stalking, assault, attempted murder, and murder; and crimes affecting both people and property, as well as arson and terrorism, such as bombings.
The United Statesanti-abortion movement is a movement in the United States that opposes induced abortion and advocates for the protection of fetal life. Advocates support legal prohibition or restriction on ethical, moral, or religious grounds, arguing that human life begins at conception and that the human zygote, embryo or fetus is a person and therefore has a right to life. The anti-abortion movement includes a variety of organizations, with no single centralized decision-making body. There are diverse arguments and rationales for the anti-abortion stance. Some allow for some permissible abortions, including therapeutic abortions, in exceptional circumstances such as incest, rape, severe fetal defects, or when the woman's health is at risk.
The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR) is an American anti-abortion organization. The Executive Director of the CBR is Gregg Cunningham, a former Republican member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives who has also held a number of other government positions. He was a member of the Reagan administration.
Philip "Flip" Benham is an Evangelical Christian minister and the national leader of Concord, North Carolina–based Operation Save America, an anti-abortion group that evolved from Operation Rescue.
Operation Rescue, the operating name of Youth Ministries Inc., is an American anti-abortion organization. The organization originated in California and is now based in Kansas.
George Richard Tiller was an American physician and abortion provider from Wichita, Kansas. He gained national attention as the medical director of Women's Health Care Services, which, at the time, was one of only three abortion clinics nationwide that provided late-term abortions.
Sidewalk counseling, also known as sidewalk interference, is a form of anti-abortion activism conducted outside abortion clinics. Activists seek to communicate with those entering the building, or with passersby in general, in an effort to persuade them not to have an abortion, or to consider their position on the morality of abortion. Common tactics include engaging in conversation, displaying signs, distributing literature, or giving directions to nearby crisis pregnancy centers.
Governments sometimes take measures designed to afford legal protection of access to abortion. Such legislation often seeks to guard facilities which provide induced abortion against obstruction, vandalism, picketing, and other actions, or to protect patients and employees of such facilities from threats and harassment.
The genetics and abortion issue is an extension of the abortion debate and the disability rights movement. Since the advent of forms of prenatal diagnosis, such as amniocentesis and ultrasound, it has become possible to detect the presence of congenital disorders in the fetus before birth. Specifically, disability-selective abortion is the abortion of fetuses that are found to have non-fatal mental or physical defects detected through prenatal testing. Many prenatal tests are now considered routine, such as testing for Down syndrome. Women who are discovered to be carrying fetuses with disabilities are often faced with the decision of whether to abort or to prepare to parent a child with disabilities.
Kermit Barron Gosnell is an American serial killer and former abortion doctor. He provided illegal late-term abortions at his clinic in West Philadelphia. Gosnell was convicted of the murders of three infants who were born alive after using drugs to induce labor, the manslaughter of one woman during an abortion procedure, and of several other abortion- and drug-related crimes. Staff at Gosnell's clinic testified that there were hundreds of infants born alive during abortion procedures, and subsequently killed by Gosnell.
Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust is a Christian American anti-abortion group based in California, founded by Jeff White. The group is best known for displaying graphic images of aborted fetuses in public locations. Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust has attracted nationwide and international attention, regarding the use of graphic abortion imagery, and the debate over the protection of the use of such imagery, by freedom of speech.
Mary Wagner is a Canadian anti-abortion advocate who has served prison sentences for entering abortion clinics to counsel mothers against abortion without consent of the facility staff.
As of 2024, abortion is illegal in Indiana. It is only legal in cases involving fatal fetal abnormalities, to preserve the life and physical health of the mother, and in cases of rape or incest up to 10 weeks of pregnancy. Previously abortion in Indiana was legal up to 20 weeks; a near-total ban that was scheduled to take effect on August 1, 2023, was placed on hold due to further legal challenges, but is set to take place, after the Indiana Supreme Court denied an appeal by the ACLU, and once it certifies a previous ruling that an abortion ban doesn't violate the state constitution. In the wake of the 2022 Dobbs Supreme Court ruling, abortion in Indiana remained legal despite Indiana lawmakers voting in favor of a near-total abortion ban on August 5, 2022. Governor Eric Holcomb signed this bill into law the same day. The new law became effective on September 15, 2022. However, on September 22, 2022, Special Judge Kelsey B. Hanlon of the Monroe County Circuit Court granted a preliminary injunction against the enforcement of the ban. Her ruling allows the state's previous abortion law, which allows abortions up to 20 weeks after fertilization with exceptions for rape and incest, to remain in effect.
Abortion in Montana is legal. The number of abortion clinics in Montana has fluctuated over the years, with twenty in 1982, twelve in 1992, eight providers of which seven were clinics in 2011, and five clinics in 2014. There were four clinics from 2015 to February 2018 when All Families Healthcare clinic in Whitefish reopened. There were 1,690 legal abortions in 2014, and 1,611 in 2015.
Abortion in California is legal up to the point of fetal viability. An abortion ban was in place by 1900, and by 1950, it was a criminal offense for a woman to have an abortion. In 1962, the American Law Institute published their model penal code, as it applied to abortions, with three circumstances where they believed a physician could justifiably perform an abortion, and California adopted a version of this code. In 2002, the California State Legislature passed a law guaranteeing women the right to have an abortion "prior to viability of the fetus, or when the abortion is necessary to protect the life or health of the woman". In 2022, 67% of California voters approved Proposition 1, which amended the Constitution of California to explicitly protect the right to abortion and contraception.
Abortion in Florida is generally illegal after six weeks from the woman's last menstrual period, when many women do not yet know they are pregnant. This law came into effect in May 2024, being approved by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis following its passage in the Florida House of Representatives and the Florida Senate, with only Republican state legislators supporting and only Democratic state legislators opposing. Additionally, pregnant women are generally required to make two visits to a medical facility 24 hours apart to be able to obtain an abortion, in a law approved by Republican Governor Rick Scott in 2015.
Lianna Olivia Rebolledo is an anti-abortion activist who travels throughout Latin America visiting shelters to counsel teen girls who are victims of rape and incest. At age 12, she was kidnapped and raped; after refusing an abortion she later gave birth to a daughter. She now works with N.G.O.s and the U.N. lobbying politicians to have laws banning abortion of pregnancies conceived in rape in Latin America. She founded a non-profit organization “Loving Life” that promotes life and supports victims of abuse.
Terrisa Lin Bukovinac is an American anti-abortion activist. A member of the Democratic Party, she formerly served as president of Democrats for Life of America and was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States in the 2024 United States presidential election, with the intent of running a campaign to outlaw abortion. She is a subject of the 2022 documentary film Battleground which profiles three leading women in the anti-abortion movement.