Editor’s note: This article first appeared at The American Spectator.
Terrisa Bukovinac is not your typical pro-lifer, and she isn’t your typical presidential candidate, either. Bukovinac is challenging President Joe Biden in the Democratic primary to protest the party’s pro-abortion stance and to bring attention to the victims of abortion.
Bukovinac, who is an atheist and an animal rights activist, wasn’t always pro-life. She started questioning her stance when a friend showed her images of abortion victims and asked how she could fight for animal rights while neglecting the rights of unborn children. Bukovinac later met Monica Snyder, a pro-life atheist, and realized that she wasn’t the only atheist who had problems with abortion.
In 2015, pro-life activist and investigative journalist David Daleiden released undercover footage showing Planned Parenthood executives discussing how they would profit from selling the body parts of aborted children. Bukovinac told The American Spectator that when she watched the videos, “Something broke in me … I knew that I was never going to have a normal life.”
Bukovinac left her job in the luxury fashion industry to found the group Pro-Life San Francisco in 2016. Later, during the 2020 election, she traveled to every Democratic debate to demand pro-life representation in the party.
In 2021, Bukovinac founded the Washington, D.C.–based Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, or PAAU. The next year, she and PAAU Director of Activism Lauren Handy discovered what they say were the bodies of 110 first-trimester and five second- and third-trimester babies being transported from the Washington Surgi-Clinic.
PAAU claims that three of the bodies showed evidence that they had been born alive.
“Holding those babies in my hands, seeing their faces up close, knowing who these children were, seeing their lives be ripped away from them in such a horrific and cruel and unjust way,” Bukovinac said, “I cannot come back from that.”
Bukovinac Campaigns for Life
Following in the footsteps of pro-life activists Randall Terry, Missy Reilly Smith, and Ellen McCormack, Bukovinac is using her candidacy to show ads featuring footage of those babies.
Federal law requires that television stations run the ads of presidential candidates, giving Bukovinac a platform free of censorship. She knows that this strategy isn’t popular, but she maintains that showing the victims of abortion is necessary to bring about social change.
“Yes, it disturbs people’s consciences,” she said, “but that’s the point.”
Bukovinac and members of her organization also participate in a form of activism they call “rescue.” This “nonviolent direct action” involves entering abortion facilities or crossing property lines to attempt to persuade women from having abortions and to challenge the legitimacy of these facilities. Sometimes, these actions result in arrests.
In July 2022, a group of activists associated with PAAU were charged with trespassing at an Alexandria, Virginia, abortion facility. Bukovinac was sentenced to four days in jail.
In August of 2023, five activists, including Lauren Handy, were convicted for allegedly violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE, Act for a 2020 rescue at the very facility where Handy and Bukovinac discovered 115 fetuses in 2022. The activists are currently incarcerated and awaiting sentencing. The FACE Act carries a possible sentence of up to 11 years in prison. Notably, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly prevented the defendants from bringing up evidence they believed suggested that federal crimes were committed at the Washington Surgi-Clinic.
Bukovinac hopes her ads will empower other pro-life Democrats to stop voting for pro-choice candidates. “It’s very obvious to me that the problem is in blue states and the Democratic party,” she said. “I think we have a chance of really damaging that toxic relationship between the abortion industry and the Democratic party. And once that relationship is broken, the abortion industry will not have power in this country anymore.”
