Why Were There Fetuses in Her Refrigerator?

Two days after police removed five fetuses from her refrigerator, Lauren Handy sits barefoot in rumpled clothes in a fellow anti-abortion protester’s cluttered Washington, D.C., apartment. She and the other activist, Terrisa Bukovinac, claim to have obtained a box of these fetuses and 110 smaller ones from a medical-waste-truck driver outside a D.C. abortion clinic. The 28-year-old cries sporadically while talking about the fetuses she’d held days earlier: “I’ve only ever wanted to love and help others,” Handy tells me.

Overnight, she became a public figure, regarded as a hero by the anti-abortion movement and a creepy fetus hoarder by everyone else. Abortion-rights activists were frustrated, as the salacious story seemed to crowd out news of unrelated criminal charges against Handy: On March 30, the U.S. Department of Justice accused her and eight other anti-abortion protesters of having conspired to block access to reproductive-health services by creating a blockade — with chains, ropes, and their bodies — back in October 2020 at the Washington Surgi-Clinic, which is also where Handy says she got the fetuses last month.

If ever there were an apt metaphor for the state of affairs in America, it’s this: Bald eagles in the D.C. area are suffering from lead poisoning. We were so distracted by the demise of repro rights, we almost forgot that the Supreme Court is also set to blow up gun control. Why union campaigns at Starbucks have spread so much further than ones at Amazon. Babies aren’t political talking points, so we’ve got to stop acting that they are and get them formula. Fashion trends aren’t what they used to be, if they even are at all. The story of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard’s incredibly glamorous, tragically short-lived Hollywood romance. Wishing everyone a good weekend, but most especially the mayor of Hell.

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