Editor’s Note: This article was updated on August 23, 2023.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – The pro-abortion judge and prosecution in the Washington D.C. FACE Act trial are desperate to keep the jury from seeing video testimony by late-term abortionist Cesare Santangelo, dubbed by pro-lifers the butcher of D.C., who in 2012 said that he would leave a baby exposed to die after birth if the child survived a failed abortion.
The admission was caught on tape by an undercover journalist from Live Action, who made an appointment at the Washington Surgi Clinic in 2013 when 24 weeks’ pregnant. When the woman asked Santangelo what he would do if the baby survived the abortion and whether she would have to take responsibility for the baby, the abortionist said that he would “not help” a child survive but would leave it exposed until it died.
According to testimony offered in court, defendant Lauren Handy conducted extensive research which showed that a high percentage of late-term abortions result in the baby surviving the attempted abortion and being born alive. Given that Santangelo’s clinic specializes in abortions conducted in the second and third trimester, Handy concluded that it was highly likely that many instances of infants born alive after a failed abortion were occurring at his facility. Based on the abortionist’s own words caught on video, Handy concluded this meant it was also highly likely that Santangelo had committed and was committing the crime of leaving babies exposed to die after failed abortions.
As the video states, according to the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, “Any child born in the United States including a survivor of a failed abortion attempt is guaranteed the full rights and legal protections of citizenship and entitled to life-saving medical care.”
It was this video that Lauren Handy and other pro-lifers watched, which served to motivate them to take part in the rescue of October 22, 2020, at the Washington-Surgi Clinic and to place themselves in harm’s way to protect the unborn babies that would be brought to the clinic to be brutally murdered that day.
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So damning is this evidence against the case of the prosecution, Santangelo, and the Washington-Surgi Clinic, that the prosecution moved to strike the video from being entered into evidence, and the judge, in lockstep with her pro-abortion advocates on the prosecution, conceded yesterday in a ruling to keep the video from being shown to the jury and the courtroom.
In fact, the prosecution argued that the material in the video could very likely move the jurors to take a stance on abortion. And this the federal advocates of abortion cannot allow.
The reason the judge claimed for striking the video from evidence was that it was “heavily edited,” was “more prejudicial than probative,” and that it included the word “abortionist,” which she claimed was a “derogatory term.” How the name of a person’s profession is considered derogatory without admitting that the activity of that profession must therefore be shameful defies the logic of an ordinary layman, but perhaps logic is not a standard to which the court is held in this trial.
It is also telling that it was this clinic, run by the abortionist in this video, with whom the FBI established a working relationship. On the morning of October 22, 2020, Santangelo‘s clinic contacted the FBI, which sent an agent to the scene who for months conducted an in-depth surveillance and research against those who participated in the pro-life rescue that morning. The FBI agent who testified in court tried to explain away his unique relationship with the abortion clinic in DC by saying the FBI was trying to establish good relationships and liaisons in the D.C. community. However, he offered no other example of a similar working relationship with any businesses within the District.
This case is just one more instance of the secret-police operation under the Biden administration, in which abortion is protected at all costs, and pro-lifers attacked, hunted down, and brought to trial for defending innocent pre-born Americans.
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To the objective observer, it should be clear that neither this trial of these pro-life rescuers nor the justice and legality of the FACE Act can wholly be separated from the justice and morality of abortion, the personhood of the child in the womb, and the innocent blood in which the abortionists of our country, under cover of law, have steeped their hands for many long decades.
In this trial, the suppression within the courtroom of nearly all evidence that directly addresses what abortion is, in its gruesome reality, only serves to show how desperate the Left really is when it comes to the murder of unwanted, unloved, and dehumanized preborn children.
The evidence, however, cannot be wholly kept from the American public. This video and others like it manifest the willingness of abortionists not only to murder the unborn but to break the law to assure that at all costs, an unwanted child is not allowed into this world. This video, suppressed in this trial by an aggressively pro-abortion judge, must be broadcast far and wide, so that this crime against humanity is exposed and the horrific abortion industry ended in our nation once and for all.
WATCH: ‘Catholicism on trial’ during third day of Washington DC FACE Act proceedings
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