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.