A new stabilization phenomenon induced by degenerate diffusion is discovered in the context of pinned planar p-elasticae. It was known that in the non-degenerate regime p ∈ (1, 2], including the classical case of Euler's elastica, there are no local minimizers other than unique global minimizers.Here we prove that, in stark contrast, in the degenerate regime p ∈ (2, ∞) there emerge uncountably many local minimizers with diverging energy.