Terrisa Bukovinac, who calls herself a “progressive, pro-life Democrat,” is the founder of Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, as well as a Democratic presidential candidate. Her politics, she says, more or less align with Bernie Sanders’, with one exception: She is passionately, unapologetically, pro-life. Bukovinac recently spoke with the Human Life Review’s Madeline Fry Schultz about the reason for her activism, her role in the infamous case involving viable fetuses found at a D.C. abortion clinic, and the real goal of her presidential campaign. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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MFS: Tell me about the journey that led you to becoming passionate about pro-life issues.

TB: I grew up in the Worldwide Church of God. I don’t remember us ever talking about abortion, but my parents were not very political. So I didn’t really have any kind of political leanings until I got to high school. That’s when I formed some pretty left-leaning views, and I was pro-choice. But when I was a little older, I dated someone who was conservative and agnostic—I was Christian and liberal. I have always had a sensitivity to animal rights, and he would say, “How can you care about the dolphins if you don’t care about unborn children being killed in the womb?” He showed me what babies look like in the womb and what an abortion victim looks like. I was shocked and disturbed, and conceded that, yeah, maybe he was right, maybe there was something bad that happens in an abortion. But there are so many horrible things happening all across the world, and I’m not doing anything about them except praying. I thought, I may be personally pro-life, but it’s not something that I’m willing to get involved with.

I maintained a politically pro-choice position until I lost my faith, which happened over the course of some years. And that’s when I started thinking about abortion again, because I started having to think about all kinds of moral issues. Like animal rights. Killing an animal to have the pleasure of eating its body, I thought, is wrong, because this is its only chance at a cognitive experience. And so, I would think also about the babies: They have a chance to have a cognitive experience, but abortion takes it away from them. And it just seemed much more egregious in my non-Christian worldview. Suddenly, all rights issues were very urgent because I didn’t feel like I could pray about them, or that God was going to fix them.

I did get involved in the animal rights movement. And I still harbored these feelings about abortion, but I didn’t really talk to anyone about it. I knew I wasn’t pro-life because I wasn’t a religious conservative. But then, around 2011, I saw that a former colleague of mine, Monica Snyder, who is now the executive director of Secular Pro-Life, was posting on a Facebook page called Secular Pro-Life. I thought, “Oh my gosh, secular pro-life? I’m a secular pro-life person.” It totally opened up my worldview. I realized there were other secular pro-life people, and I also met other leftist prolifers through that circle online. I thought, certainly people will understand at some point that abortion is oppression and that it isn’t progressive. But obviously, things haven’t gone in that direction.

MFS: How did you really start to get involved?

TB: I launched Pro-Life San Francisco in 2017, and then in late 2019, I realized that in order to try to make change, I had to do direct action.

The pro-life movement didn’t look like an activist movement. It didn’t look at all like a movement for human rights or social justice or anything recognizable to someone on the Left. And then I eventually discovered the truth about its history. I didn’t even know that the pro-life movement had done rescues, and that 75,000 arrests were made during the rescue era, making it the largest peaceful civil disobedience movement in the history of the country. Finding that out was shocking to me—and motivating. I knew then that I wanted to create a group that would engage in that type of thing. I also realized that it had to be more than just direct action, that we had to be politically engaged, because elections present the best opportunities for us to get our message out and to seize political power from the people who kill babies. And so, I convinced Democrats for Life to send me a banner—I wasn’t part of that organization except that I was a pro-life Democrat—and traveled to every city where there was a Democratic national debate. I rallied people and protested, and the media got to know me and the group of people that I was mobilizing. And that’s how Kristen Day got that question to Pete Buttigieg about whether or not pro-life Democrats are welcome in the party, and it was this big viral moment. I knew that we had to have representation in the Democratic Party.

Now I’m running for president, and the reason I’m doing so is because I cannot spend another election cycle complaining that we have no representation if I myself am not willing to just do it. When I’m looking at the abortion landscape in America, it’s obvious to me that the Democratic Party is the problem—its relationship with the abortion industry is allowing this widespread killing.

Back in 2021, I wanted to start a truly leftist pro-life organization. The only ones who are moving the party in any direction are progressives. I wanted to assemble a group of progressives that would help put pressure on the party. So in October of that year, I founded Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising.

Since then, we’ve spent a lot of time doing direct actions and rescues and standing and mobilizing activists outside the Supreme Court; and we had the unprecedented discovery of fetal remains in Washington, D.C. All those things had a major impact on me. I just knew that I had to take the next step, that I needed to actually run for president to create this space for Democrats— not to win, not to make it to the White House. It’s purely about saying, “Look, we are pro-life Democrats. We’re not going away. We’re still making noise. We’re still cool. We’re still recruiting more people. We’re getting cooler.”

As a federal candidate, I can amplify the pro-life message to the American people by running uncensored ads about the babies that I found. Any Federal Communications Commission TV station must run federal candidate ads uncensored.

MFS: Your story about discovering fetal remains at the Washington, D.C. abortion clinic was all over the news at the time. Tell me about it and what happened afterward.

TB: On March 25, 2022, [PAAU Director of Activism and Mutual Aid] Lauren Handy and I went to the Washington Surgi-Clinic to do a pink rose rescue. That’s where we go inside, offer roses to the moms, and try to encourage them to leave their abortion appointments. We did a pink rose rescue at the same clinic just a few months before that, and we saved a baby.

But when we got there, we didn’t go inside because we saw a medical waste truck parked outside labeled Curtis Bay Medical Waste Services. We walked around to the back of the truck and saw the driver was loading boxes onto the back that said, “biomedical waste — hazard.” I said, “Do you know what’s in these boxes?” And the driver said no. “It’s dead babies,” I said. He looked really shocked. Then I said, “Would you get in trouble if we took one of these boxes?” He asked what we would do with the babies, and Lauren said, “We’ll give them a proper funeral and a burial.” And so he said, “Okay.” We took them back to Lauren’s brand new apartment and called everybody we could possibly think of to call who’s handled fetal remains. Then we went to the drugstore. We got gloves; we got masks. We were very scared. We set up cameras; we called a photographer. And then we opened the box. Inside were the bodies of 115 aborted babies, all in their own individual containers, each of them dated with the initials of the parent. Except for these five bigger buckets, which were in another bag by themselves.

When Lauren pulled them out of the box, we all panicked because bigger buckets, bigger babies. She opened the biggest bucket first. “This baby’s whole,” she said. She pulled the baby out, this beautiful baby boy, totally intact. And well past 30 weeks. Right away we could tell what the gestational ages were because we have fetal models with us all the time. We know how big babies are, at what age, and usually we carry around the 22-week model, which was completely dwarfed by the giant babies that we found in those buckets.

It was absolutely soul crushing, heartbreaking, sobering, disgusting. We wanted to throw up. I was so angry at the world. I’ve just never seen such horror up close and personal—the moral depravity, almost a hatred for humankind. I’m an atheist. I don’t buy into this whole, “we just have to be there to love the babies.” I don’t care if they’re loved; I’m trying to save their lives. But I really did feel just an overwhelming sense of love and care for them. Just seeing who they were, and their potential and everything that they could have been, all of that taken from them. It’s still not my priority to love the babies, but they really are being horribly victimized. And they deserve to be loved.

We open the rest of the buckets. We call everyone; we don’t know what to do; everyone’s giving us tons of different advice. We have several lawyers; they’re all giving us different advice. It was a scary time. We put the babies’ remains in the refrigerator in Lauren’s apartment to try to preserve them. I went days without sleeping while they were in the refrigerator. But I was on the phone constantly, and really scared. I can’t even explain how difficult those days were.

We had to make a decision. Lauren is Catholic. She was very, very concerned about the babies not being buried. I don’t care whether or not they’re buried; I want justice for them. I don’t want to destroy evidence. We eventually came to an agreement. The 110 babies in the smaller containers were to be buried. I didn’t want to be involved in it, but I wouldn’t fight her on it if she would agree to allow the police to come pick up the other five babies because these were victims of federal crimes. They might actually have a chance of getting justice, and we couldn’t find a single private pathologist willing to look at them. Even to this day, a pathologist has not agreed to be involved in this in any way.

So we made those arrangements with the police, and that’s when the police leaked the story to the press. It was the same day that Lauren was arrested by the FBI for another rescue [and charged with violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE].

The whole world just came crashing in. Once people heard that Lauren was “keeping fetuses in her home,” which isn’t exactly true, I was kind of erased from the story because they were found in her apartment, and she was the one arrested by the FBI. That’s when all the rumors and all the hate for us—in the movement, outside the movement—began. Everyone was like, “fetus freaks.” Without even knowing anything about how the babies had gotten there, or anything about what the truth was, it was just horrible being treated like that by your own movement, without anyone even talking to you.

MFS: People in the pro-life movement were not supportive?

TB: A lot of people attacked Lauren and me online, making up all kinds of lies based on a whole bunch of assumptions. Everyone in the world felt entitled to the details of the story before we shared them. And they were saying we were hiding stuff. That we were obviously covering up something blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. There was more of that after we had a press conference, but in the time between our giving the babies to the police, the police leaking the story, and our holding a press conference, there was this sh** storm on social media. A lot of people in the pro-life movement just cannot fathom the hell that we were in during that time. It was a tremendous struggle for us to get through that. It really felt like the world was coming after us.

Since then, the babies have stayed in the hands of the medical examiner. The only real next step is for Congress to hold hearings for these children. [Abortionist Cesare] Santangelo needs to be called to testify. Congress needs to demand autopsies, but they’ve kind of dropped the ball.

This is the most significant discovery of fetal remains in my generation. They show that some of these victims were killed illegally. Others were killed legally but past the point of viability. Most Democrats don’t even believe that’s happening. These hearings are a way to prove it’s happening. And that is the pathway to a national ban. I don’t see how these so-called pro-life legislators can possibly think that we can pass a national ban if they’re not willing to stand up for these specific children and show the American people what abortion did to them.

MFS: And you have a lot of Democratic candidates saying partial-birth abortion, late-term abortion are just talking points, and they’re not happening. Here you are with evidence that they really are happening.

TB: Right, and then they’ll say, “those were probably babies with fatal anomalies.” An autopsy might help clear that up. We should all be for clarifying what happened to these children. It’s not just that it had such a profound effect on me personally; it’s that I can’t see a more important angle to work right now, to show the truth about abortion. Which is also why I’m planning to run the ads. If Congress won’t do it, I’m going to do it myself, to the best of my ability and as much as a federal candidate is allowed, but I still will never have the institutional power Congress has to get this done.

MFS: If you did have that institutional power, as president, what policies would you want to implement?

TB: I really want to be clear with people that I’m not under the illusion that I’m going to be president. I am here simply to disrupt the Democratic Party on the abortion issue and to show pictures of these babies. I do stand for progressive policies. I believe that the abortion crisis can be addressed only through very comprehensive, intersectional, whole-life approaches: addressing social inequalities, addressing systemic racism, addressing houselessness. I don’t think that those things can be properly addressed through conservative policies. I believe the wealthy 1 percent has to be accountable to the 99 percent. You can say that my politics are lockstep with Cornel West or Bernie Sanders. But I believe that the abortion issue is a part of that, that abortion is oppression. It is a symptom of unrestricted capitalism, of massive inequality, and income inequality.

I do believe that the abortion crisis can only be addressed that way. People can take from that what they want. I’m not here, necessarily, to enact progressive policy, but I am here to represent people who don’t see the GOP being able to adequately address the root causes, or what we believe are the root causes, of abortion, and who don’t want to be complicit in child killing. I’m giving them other options. That’s what this campaign is about.