Showing posts with label unborn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label unborn. Show all posts
Thursday, August 25, 2016
How a Formerly Pro-Choice Nursing Instructor Discusses Abortion with her Students
http://thetorchblog.net/?p=996
August 12, 2016 by Cynthia Isabell
I have been a labor and delivery nurse since 1980. During my thirty-six year nursing career, I have also worked in medical units and for hospice. Being a nurse has allowed me to be present with people through their early beginnings of intrauterine life, and with others through their last breaths. It has been an amazing and rewarding journey. Life is precious and life is fleeting, and life should be respected. I am pro-life. I am also a nursing instructor and have taught obstetrics to hundreds of young men and women, our future nurses. My students often ask me what my opinion is regarding abortion. “Are you pro-life or pro-choice?” they ask me. I do not ask them the same, as I don’t want them to fear that their position might affect how I grade them. When I answer that I am pro-life, the students often assume that my position is based on my religious beliefs, and so they respond that “you can’t force your religious beliefs on everyone else.” I explain that my argument against abortion is based on the anatomy and physiology of pregnancy, and on logical reasoning... Cynthia, DNP, ACNS-BC, is a registered nurse with twenty-eight years experience working in low and high risk obstetrics, and eight years working medical surgical and hospice nursing. Cynthia has also been a nursing instructor for seventeen years. She holds a masters degree in adult health nursing and Doctor of Nursing Practice with a certificate in nursing education.
Thursday, February 18, 2016
Pregnant Women’s Rights Must Be Fully Protected by the Criminal Law
by Denise M. Burke April 15, 2014 5:15 PM
Recent media misinformation, perhaps deliberate on the part of left-leaning commentators, currently casts a cloud over efforts to give women more protection when they are forced to defend themselves and their unborn children.
Imagine being pregnant with quadruplets and having your babies’ father viciously punch you in the stomach during an argument. You remind him that you are carrying his children and warn him not to punch you in the stomach again. Tragically, he doesn’t heed your warning and instead comes at you. Fearing for your children, you grab a knife and stab him. He later dies, and you are charged with homicide.
At your criminal trial, you want to argue to the jury that your actions were legally justified because you were acting in defense of your unborn children. However, the judge determines that state law does not permit you to make that argument, and you are ultimately convicted and sentenced to prison.
This is not just a hypothetical. It actually happened to a Michigan woman in 1999. Her conviction was later reversed when an appellate court determined that Michigan law did, in fact, permit a woman to use force in defense of her unborn child.
Notably, this was the first time a court had extended the “defense of others” theory to the defense of an unborn child. Courts in Texas and Illinois had previously refused to do so, despite the significant and ongoing problem of pregnancy-related violence including violence specifically directed toward unborn children.
Each year, thousands of cases of unlawful violence against pregnant women and their unborn children are reported. These incidents continue to underscore the urgent need to ensure that our criminal laws protect both the woman and her unborn child, and that they also affirmatively provide legal protection to a woman who must resort to force in defense of her unborn child.
The Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act, model legislation developed in 2008 by Americans United for Life, is designed to amend a state’s existing criminal code and provides that a woman may use force — even deadly force — to defend her unborn child from unlawful violence or a criminal attack.
Attempts by some in the media to distort the intent and impact of the Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act and to smear Americans United for Life as encouraging violence against abortion providers represent thinly veiled, politically motivated attacks that blatantly ignore the stated intent of the model legislation. The legislation is intended simply to ensure that a pregnant woman and her unborn child are protected from unlawful criminal violence and that a woman’s decision to carry her child to term is respected. They also reveal a fundamental — and perhaps willful — misunderstanding of the express terms of the Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act, the scope and application of criminal law, and the purposes and intent behind this model language.
MYTH: The Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act will “legalize” or “incite” violence against abortion providers.
TRUTH: The Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act applies only to situations in which unlawful force is being applied or imminently threatened against an unborn child. Moreover, under the narrow tailoring of the Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act, only the child’s mother — and not a third-party — may be justified in using force to defend the unborn child.
Under well-established criminal jurisprudence, a person is justified in using force in the “defense of another” when unlawful force is being applied or threatened against that other person. Arguably, a “person” includes an unborn child under federal criminal law and the laws of 38 states that recognize an unborn child as a potential victim of violence.
In this instance, examples of the use of unlawful force would include punching or beating a pregnant woman with the intent of causing a miscarriage or damage to the pregnancy or threatening the use of a knife or other weapon against the unborn child. Notably, the force applied in response to the threat must be “reasonable” or comparable to the threat. Thus, deadly force can be used, although only in cases of extreme peril.
The provisions of the Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act come into play only when unlawful force is being applied or threatened. It does not apply to lawful activity.
Abortion is legal in the United States and a woman must consent to an abortion before it is performed. Thus, under no reasonable reading of the Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act can it be construed as applying to the provision of abortion (which is a legal act and not unlawful force) or as justifying or excusing criminal violence against those who perform legal abortions.
This narrow application of the Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act is confirmed by the Michigan appellate decision noted earlier where the justices specifically said:[BLOCK]The distinction between the abortion cases and the instant case is straightforward. The United States Supreme Court has held that the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees the right to personal privacy and that this right encompasses a woman’s decision whether to terminate her pregnancy. The “defense of others” theory is available only if a person acts to prevent unlawful bodily harm against another. Because clinics that perform abortions are engaging in lawful activity, the “defense of others” theory does not apply. . . . Our holding . . . does not apply to what the United States Supreme Court has held to constitute lawful abortions.[BLOCK]
MYTH: The Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act is part of a “campaign” to target abortion providers.
TRUTH: AUL drafted the Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act in 2008 in direct response to the well-documented threats of violence faced by pregnant women and their children. Moreover, in keeping with its pro-life convictions, AUL has always denounced violence against abortion providers and would never promulgate model legislation that could reasonably be construed as calling for or excusing such violence.
As detailed in the legislative findings section of the Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act, evidence has shown that violence and abuse are often higher during pregnancy than during any other period in a woman’s lifetime. Based on studies conducted between 1995 and 1999, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimated that at least 300,000 pregnant women are abused each year. Moreover, according to the March of Dimes, one in six pregnant women has been abused by a partner. Similarly, a 1998 household survey determined that pregnant women are 60.6 percent more likely to be beaten than women who are not pregnant.
In fact, a pregnant woman is more likely to be a victim of homicide than to die of any other cause. And case after case has demonstrated that husbands or boyfriends are often the perpetrators of pregnancy-related violence, and this violence is often directed at the unborn child or intended to end or jeopardize the pregnancy.
It is precisely these threats that AUL seeks to address with the Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act.
MYTH: The protections provided by the Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act are unnecessary and are not supported by existing law.
TRUTH: The Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act is a logical extension of existing federal and state criminal laws that provide for the right to use force in the “defense of others” and other criminal law provisions that recognize and protect unborn children.
All 50 states permit the use of force in specified circumstances: for self defense, in the defense of others, and when a person reasonably believes that unlawful force is being used or will imminently be used against him/her or a third person. “Self-defense” and the “defense of others” are affirmative defenses raised by a criminal defendant that, if proven true, can provide a complete defense to criminal liability.
With that in mind, it is easy to see that the application of the affirmative defense of “defense of others” to cases where a mother uses force to protect the life of her unborn child is a natural extension of accepted criminal jurisprudence including existing unborn victims of violence protections (i.e., fetal homicide laws and fetal assault laws) that recognize the unborn as potential victims of criminal violence.
The federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act (more commonly known as “Laci and Conner’s Law,” after Laci and Conner Peterson), as well as the laws of 38 states, recognizes an unborn child as a separate victim of criminal violence and treats the killing of an unborn child as a form of homicide. In addition, 22 states define non-fatal assaults on unborn children as criminal offenses.
Thus, it is clear that recognizing the unborn as “others” for purposes of the “defense of others” theory in no way diverges from current federal and state criminal law. If under a state’s criminal code an unborn child is recognized as a potential victim of homicide or assault, then that unborn child can be protected through the use of force when warranted.
Recognizing this, Oklahoma, in 2009, became the first state to enact AUL’s Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act, explicitly expanding the affirmative defense of “defense of others” to include instances where a pregnant woman uses force to protect her unborn child. Arkansas and Missouri have also enacted this protective legislation.
MYTH: The Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act is simply another tool in the “abortion wars.”
TRUTH: The “Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act” is not an abortion bill and attempts by some in the media to subsume the Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act into the debate over abortion do a grave disservice to abused women and vulnerable unborn children who are often the targets of criminal violence.
The Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act does not contain the word “abortion” anywhere in the text of the model legislation. (In fact, the word “abortion” is used only twice in the policy guide accompanying the model legislation, where it is used as an adjective in the term “abortion provider.” Notably, in this context, “abortion provider” is used when noting that the Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act cannot legitimately or honestly be argued to condone, promote, or incite violence against abortion providers.)
Finally, there is a good reason for the absence of the term “abortion” in the AUL model language: The bill is not about abortion. As detailed above, the bill is intended to ensure that a pregnant woman is able to protect her unborn child from criminal violence. In doing so, it also protects her individual decision to carry her child to term — her choice for life.
— Denise M. Burke is Americans United for Life’s vice president of legal affairs.
Thursday, October 29, 2015
An Appeal to Men to Stand up for Women and Care for and Defend Their Children
By September 16, 2015
http://www.epm.org/blog/2015/Sep/16/appeal-men
The tenth video exposé about Planned Parenthood from The Center for Bioethical Reform was released yesterday. You can view it, and more related articles, on the ERLC site.
The history of abortion in America should bring more shame to men than to anyone. No pregnancy happens without a man. Men should take the responsibility for their own purity and to protect that of women. When they fail to do this, they should be the first to accept full responsibility for the consequences of their actions, including the conception of a child.
As George Gilder argues in Men and Marriage, [i] when men exercise deep loyalties to women and children, when we take responsibility to protect and defend them, we are at our best; when we violate those loyalties, we are at our worst. We become abusers on the one hand, or passive cowards on the other. We place ourselves under the rightful scorn of women and under the judgment of God.
When I spoke on this subject at my church, a man in his sixties told me of a girl he got pregnant thirty-nine years ago. She gave him the choice of what to do, and he chose an abortion. He said it has haunted him since. He thinks about the woman he failed and the son or daughter he lost and wonders about the grandchildren he’d now be holding. He said to me, “Tell people about the consequences. Warn our young men—tell them God will hold them accountable for what they do with their children.” Then he broke down in tears and said, “I don’t want our young men to do what I did thirty-nine years ago.”
One of our home Bible study leaders came to me, tears in his eyes. He told me of an abortion he paid for years ago and the devastating impact it had on his life. A quarter of a million babies are aborted each year by women who describe themselves as “evangelical” or “born again." [ii] Most of these women no doubt have some church affiliation. In many cases the father of the child attends the same church. It is not only a moral crisis, but a matter of great shame that Christian men have been so weak that they not only commit sexual immorality, but allow a child to be killed to cover up their sin and make their lives easier (until their conscience takes revenge).
For the sake of women and children—and for our own sakes—it is time for men to stand up and make whatever sacrifices are necessary to care for children they have fathered. If this means begging the forgiveness of women, or standing in front of church leaders or a congregation and confessing their sin, so be it. If this were done more often, more young men in the church would be encouraged to pursue purity and discouraged from ever letting a child die for their sins.
Abortion isn’t a women’s issue. It’s a human issue, and its effects are devastating to women and men alike. But it’s high time for men to take personal responsibility, stand up for women and children, and exercise the kind of leadership God expects of us.
Sources[i] George Gilder, Men and Marriage (Gretna, La.: Pelican, 1992).
[ii] Family Planning Perspectives, July–August 1996, 12.
http://www.epm.org/blog/2015/Sep/16/appeal-men
http://www.epm.org/blog/2015/Sep/16/appeal-men
The tenth video exposé about Planned Parenthood from The Center for Bioethical Reform was released yesterday. You can view it, and more related articles, on the ERLC site.
The history of abortion in America should bring more shame to men than to anyone. No pregnancy happens without a man. Men should take the responsibility for their own purity and to protect that of women. When they fail to do this, they should be the first to accept full responsibility for the consequences of their actions, including the conception of a child.
As George Gilder argues in Men and Marriage, [i] when men exercise deep loyalties to women and children, when we take responsibility to protect and defend them, we are at our best; when we violate those loyalties, we are at our worst. We become abusers on the one hand, or passive cowards on the other. We place ourselves under the rightful scorn of women and under the judgment of God.
When I spoke on this subject at my church, a man in his sixties told me of a girl he got pregnant thirty-nine years ago. She gave him the choice of what to do, and he chose an abortion. He said it has haunted him since. He thinks about the woman he failed and the son or daughter he lost and wonders about the grandchildren he’d now be holding. He said to me, “Tell people about the consequences. Warn our young men—tell them God will hold them accountable for what they do with their children.” Then he broke down in tears and said, “I don’t want our young men to do what I did thirty-nine years ago.”
One of our home Bible study leaders came to me, tears in his eyes. He told me of an abortion he paid for years ago and the devastating impact it had on his life. A quarter of a million babies are aborted each year by women who describe themselves as “evangelical” or “born again." [ii] Most of these women no doubt have some church affiliation. In many cases the father of the child attends the same church. It is not only a moral crisis, but a matter of great shame that Christian men have been so weak that they not only commit sexual immorality, but allow a child to be killed to cover up their sin and make their lives easier (until their conscience takes revenge).
For the sake of women and children—and for our own sakes—it is time for men to stand up and make whatever sacrifices are necessary to care for children they have fathered. If this means begging the forgiveness of women, or standing in front of church leaders or a congregation and confessing their sin, so be it. If this were done more often, more young men in the church would be encouraged to pursue purity and discouraged from ever letting a child die for their sins.
Abortion isn’t a women’s issue. It’s a human issue, and its effects are devastating to women and men alike. But it’s high time for men to take personal responsibility, stand up for women and children, and exercise the kind of leadership God expects of us.
Sources[i] George Gilder, Men and Marriage (Gretna, La.: Pelican, 1992).
[ii] Family Planning Perspectives, July–August 1996, 12.
http://www.epm.org/blog/2015/Sep/16/appeal-men
Sunday, September 14, 2014
Memorial for the Aborted Children of Americanism
Yesterday was commemorated the children who have been aborted in this country. This is how it began.
A Funeral for “No One”
http://clinicquotes.com/a-funeral-for-no-one/
A Funeral for “No One”
From the book Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory – an account of a funeral given to thousands of aborted babies rescued from a dumpster outside an abortion clinic. It was written by Monica Miller.
This chapter has been edited due to length.
Chapter Eighteen
The Funeral for “No One”
“To forget murder victims is to kill them twice.”
(Elie Weisel)
. . .
Those involved with the retrievals decided that the best course of action was to obtain as many bodies of the aborted babies as possible and then, after a large number were in our possession, begin the arrangements for their burials. It would have been difficult, very time consuming and expensive to bury bodies every two or three weeks as they were accumulated. Besides, we firmly believed that the babies deserved a real funeral with a real graveside ceremony. We did not want to repeatedly put bodies into the ground when services for them would have been difficult to arrange every time. We were also resolved not to allow the babies to be buried in haste and secrecy as had happened with the bodies from the Michigan Avenue Medical Center.
This time, the burials of the victims of abortion would be well-planned, well-attended, and very well- advertised.
Edmund and I had told John Cavanaugh-O’Keefe about the aborted baby find and that we were in possession of thousands of bodies. In 1986 and 1987, when he worked for Human Life International, John retrieved four hundred and fifty bodies of aborted babies from Washington D.C. abortion centers. John was opposed to mass burials. He believed that each unborn child should be granted an individual burial because the brief period of their lives was not the criteria by which their personhood was measured. Each unborn child was a unique member of the human race, and John wanted to recognize the unique personhood of each of these fetal children and not just have them buried anonymously together. Moreover, John, a former anti-war activist, believed that what we did with the unborn (living and dead) foreshadowed what we would do with the rest of the world in terms of peace. If we buried the babies in mass graves what kind of world violence were we preparing for? What kind of world violence were we willing to accept?
I wanted very much to do what John urged and give each child an individual burial so that each child’s personal existence and humanity could be honored. If I had had only a dozen bodies, or fifty, or a hundred or maybe even three hundred, perhaps it could have been done. We would have found three hundred individual pro-lifers all over the country who would have organized three hundred funerals.
But we had literally thousands of bodies. Edmund and I had retrieved over two thousand of them. Tim Murphy and the other Chicago activists had approximately three thousand. By the time our retrieval efforts came to an end, over 5000 bodies were in need of burial. To communicate with over 5000 pro-lifers and ship the bodies to them was a massive undertaking. It probably meant that we would do no other pro-life work except arrange for the burials of the aborted unborn for months to come. I did not want to be in the funeral business forever.
Edmund and I were set upon one thing, which was a sort of compromise with what John had hoped for. We knew the particular cities where the babies had been aborted and we thought it only right that the babies be buried in the cities where they may have been brought into life and where they certainly had been killed.
We contacted pro-lifers in Raleigh, Fargo, Fort Wayne, Fairfield, and Wilmington. We tried to arrange to have the bodies transported by car to the various cities and states, since we believed that transport through the mail or United Parcel Service was not in keeping with the dignity of the bodies. That is how they had been shipped to the loading dock by the abortion clinic workers. The only bodies shipped parcel post were those killed in Raleigh. In July, 1988, Edmund drove his super Beetle six hundred miles to Philadelphia and gave Joe Foreman, who was living there at the time, two hundred bodies of aborted babies. These bodies were of unborn babies killed at the New Jersey Women’s Health Organization and the Delaware Women’s Health Organization. The bodies were then given to pro-lifers from those states. Not wanting to spend Citizens for Life’s money, Edmund had pawned his guitar to finance his Philadelphia excursion.
The unborn killed in Raleigh by Dr. Marx were buried at a cemetery in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The funeral was organized by John Cavanaugh-O’Keefe’s sister, Lucy O’Keefe.
I made arrangements with Charlene Crommit of the Diocese of Fargo’s Respect Life Office to have the Fargo babies transported back there. One hundred and forty unborn babies killed in Fargo, North Dakota were placed in one small infant’s coffin and sent by jet to that city. The transport by jet had been paid for by the Fargo diocese and the small white coffin was met by a representative of the bishop of the Fargo diocese, John Sullivan. The transport by jet had been arranged by Brent Funeral Home in Milwaukee just as the body of any human being is transported for burial. (In hindsight, all of the bodies of aborted babies should have been delivered this way.) In Fargo, Bishop James Sullivan personally led the burial service for the fetal children.
Several years ago, Joe Scheidler and I sat at a table in a Burger King on Clark Street in Chicago. Several other pro-lifers sat with us or at tables nearby. We had been testifying at hearings called by Cook County Board president George Dunne, who sought to end the practice of abortion at Cook County Hospital. There was a break in the proceedings, so our large gang of pro-lifers all traipsed to the Burger King for lunch.
Over burgers, fries and sodas Joe narrated how he witnessed the birth of his second daughter, Annie. As he told the story, Joe’s face sparkled with joy. “After seeing this little life come out of the womb–my own little daughter–I never felt such happiness. I felt like I was levitating. It was then that I realized that to attack an innocent child inside its mother’s womb was the closest thing to killing God.”
Perhaps Joe’s insight was founded in coming to know how abortion attacks what is sacred in man–a sacredness that comes from God. Furthermore, to attack the developing child in his mother’s womb is an attack on the order of God’s creation. Abortion not only kills a human being; it also undoes the bonds of human communion. It is in human unity and the intrinsic inter-relatedness of persons that man knows and experiences God’s own love. God centered the order of creation in the unity of human persons: man and woman, husband and wife, mother and child. Abortion unravels human bonds–indeed wrenches those bonds apart and thus is an attempt to unravel creation.
Just beyond a closed door in my apartment lay the dismembered bodies of unborn children. I began to know their isolation and to understand that the aborted child’s isolation is caused by the triumph of another individual in isolation–the lonely monadic self who must secure its own identity and power by suppressing or annihilating all who threaten to be in relation to it. Here lay these silent bodies in the hands of a stranger in a strange place, who had taken them from a loading dock. They were apart from their mothers. Apart and distant from their fathers. Apart from the towns where they had been conceived. In them I knew the denial of man’s most intrinsic bonds. Roe v. Wade was based on the premise, indeed on the philosophy, that the woman stands alone. Abortion isolates a woman from all other human beings in the world. Under Roe no one–not parents, boyfriend or husband–has any claim upon the woman and her baby. The power needed to accomplish such a radical, ultimate separation between the woman and her child is achieved by the woman’s isolating herself from all others in the world who, inherently, do stand in relation to her. The promoters of legal abortion do tout it as “a private decision between a woman and her physician.” And there is truth in this point of view. The isolated woman necessarily makes a compact with a nameless stranger. Most often, even in legal abortion the woman may not even know the physician’s name and may never have seen him before. Most likely the woman will never see him again. There is no real relation between the abortion-bound woman and the person who will kill her baby. The abortionist is a kind of high priest who presides over a ritual of alienation.
. . .
In June, 1988, Joe Scheidler sat down at a table with Joseph Cardinal Bernardin in a room at the archdiocesan chancery office located on Superior Street in the posh north end of the Chicago Loop. Joe, with other pro-life leaders who attended the meeting, wanted to discuss frustrations the pro-life community had with the diocese and Bernardin’s own lack of hard-core involvement in the anti-abortion struggle. For years Catholics in the archdiocese active in the pro-life cause had felt that they were very much on their own. Few priests provided encouragement; some indeed, were hostile to pro-life initiatives and the archdiocese provided very little institutional Church backing for pro-life activist work. Joe and the other pro-life leaders who attended the meeting hoped to initiate a change. At the meeting, Joe suggested ways Bernardin himself could become more involved. Joe told him there were aborted babies that needed to be buried and asked the cardinal if he would officiate at the burial himself. The cardinal agreed.
On a sunny and warm July 30, 1988, I drove with two friends from Milwaukee to Queen of Heaven cemetery in Hillside, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago. We parked the car and walked to the small chapel located in the mausoleum. A hearse was parked in the circular drive outside of the chapel; inside it were two large, beige-colored and exceptionally ornate adult caskets. They contained the bodies of the two thousand aborted babies to be buried that day. We entered the chapel, and I took a seat in a pew near the front reserved for those who had helped take the bodies out of the trash. I saw Joe Scheidler, Tim Murphy, Jerry McCarthy, Brian Pabich and Peter Krump. In another ten minutes the chapel was filled to overflowing, and the funeral Mass soon began. Bernardin was the primary celebrant and the homilist. After the Mass the mourners returned to their cars and followed the hearse through the winding streets of the cemetery until it came to a plot at the extreme west end. The caskets were unloaded from the hearse and placed on transport tables with castors. I and the others who were involved with the retrieval acted as pall bearers to the grave site.
Bernardin was standing near the open ground, and Fr. Coughlin stood near him. Soon six hundred people gathered around to join in the burial ceremony. There were also several TV cameras and photographers and journalists present. Bernardin blessed the ground, blessed the caskets and offered prayers for the dead. In a matter of moments the ceremony was over.
Indeed, everything was perfect. The Mass and burial were marked with the greatest dignity and solemnity. The caskets seemed suitable for royalty. And most important, the burial was public. That day the victims of abortion were not buried in haste and in secret.
Indeed, Bernardin took some flack for officiating at the burial. Colleen Connell of the American Civil Liberties Union who had criticized our on-the-street press conference a year earlier, now criticized the cardinal in a Chicago Tribune story:
He allowed himself to be used in a shameless publicity stunt. It’s one thing for the cardinal to say the Catholic Church is opposed to abortion.
But it’s quite another for him to participate in an action which demeans the personal privacy and integrity of women who may or may not be church members.
Perhaps Connell would have been satisfied if the fetal remains had been left in the trash. She also failed to consider that some women, indeed perhaps quite a few, would be comforted to know that their unborn baby was given a humane burial. Connell also questioned whether laws had been broken by those of us who “provided the fetuses.”
Bernardin told the reporter that he did not ask where the babies had come from and did not know what the legal ramifications might be but stated that “they would pale into insignificance when compared to the taking of innocent human life. I knew what I was doing, and what I was doing was a corporal work of mercy done in a very beautiful religious ceremony.”
[Miller then discusses another burial ceremony]
Prayers were said, hymns sung and then finally the six coffins were placed in the ground. We did not want to leave the actual burial for the cemetery grounds crew. We wanted to bury the babies ourselves to make it a more personal act. A young man lowered himself down into the massive grave. Greg Gesch and another young man passed the coffins down to him. Soon all of the coffins lay at the bottom of this deep, red-earthen hole.
The young man was pulled out. I took one long last look at the coffins below me. We then took turns shoveling the red clay into the grave until it was filled.
Local media coverage was extensive. A huge photo of the burial dominated the front page of the August 6th Tallahassee Democrat. We were stunned and delighted to see it. The photo was exceptionally poignant. It showed the young man in the grave with his arms outstretched to receive a coffin. It was beautiful. The Jacksonville Journal published a well-balanced article with photos–except the headline read “Pro-lifers bury caskets in protest” and stated that we “said [the caskets] contained the remains of aborted fetuses.” The article gave the impression that perhaps we were burying empty coffins!
The next morning one-hundred and thirty-one pro-lifers, including me, blocked the door to the North Florida Women’s Health and Counseling Services. Susan Brindle, Joan’s sister, was arrested as she held her two year old daughter Peggy. Tom Herlihy, Father Robert Pearson, Joe Wall and Ed Martin were also arrested. With sixty other women, I spent two nights in the Leon County jail. In the meantime Edmund and his family, with a small contingent of friends, buried nine of the aborted babies in ground set aside as a cemetery on land the Miller family owned near their home in Lloyd.
When we returned home from our Florida trip, final preparations were made for the burial of aborted babies in Milwaukee. The day of the burial, Saturday, September 10th, was very warm and sunny. The burial was well-advertised. Citizens for Life had sent out a large mailing; and there were two ads in the Catholic Herald, the archdiocesan newspaper, as well as a small ad in the Milwaukee Journal.
The Christian radio station, WVCY, had made several announcements about the burial in the preceding weeks. I expected this funeral to be well-attended.
Edmund and I awoke very early. We placed seven aborted babies in one of the wooden white coffins that he had made. We took these seven out of the whirl-pacs and actually assembled the small broken limbs. They were bodies of aborted babies killed at the Metropolitan Medical Services. Metropolitan occupied a small, two- story modern, non-descript building near the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and 27th St. Its east wall butted up against the west wall of a Marquette University co-ed dormitory. It always bothered me that Marquette as an institution, and the students themselves, seemed oblivious to the killing of the unborn that occurred right next door to them. Years earlier the Christian Radio station, WVCY, had first broadcast from that building. Vic Eliason, the founder of WVCY, was always saddened when he thought of what was going on in the building now. after Metropolitan moved into the building a karate studio rented the second floor but it had long since moved out. Abortions were done in the basement.
Metropolitan was one of the few places that could strictly be called an abortion clinic. Nothing else was done there.
When it first opened, just after the Roe v. Wade decision, three doctors took turns doing the abortions: Neville Sender (born in England), George Woodward and Nathan Hilrich. Without explanation, Hilrich quit doing abortions in 1987. Of the three-man team, Sender was certainly the most committed to the abortion practice, with Woodward a close second. In the late 1980′s both Sender and Woodward were in their mid to late sixties. Sender had boasted in the Milwaukee Journal that he had performed illegal abortions before Roe v. Wade He also shocked pro-lifers when, in reference to abortion, he told the Journal: “Of course we know it’s killing but the state permits killing in certain circumstances.”
. . .
Metropolitan was located in a shabby section of the near-downtown area. It was in an integrated neighborhood with commercial businesses, lots of apartment buildings, and old homes in obvious need of paint and repair. Carol Robbins was one of the most faithful sidewalk counselors at Metropolitan. She could be seen standing in front of the building nearly every day that the abortion center was open. On a warm summer day in 1991, a good-looking young man walked past the clinic. He stopped for a moment to look at Carol’s picket sign which displayed photos of aborted babies in the first trimester. Carol went over to him and gave him some pro-life literature which also showed aborted babies.
The young man looked at the pictures.
“What do you think about that?,” Carol asked him.
“Hum, the man said, “It makes me hungry.”
Three weeks later, on Monday, July 22, 1991, the young man was arrested. When Carol saw the television news clips about his arrest, she gasped. The man was Jeffrey Dahmer who, over a period of thirteen years, had killed seventeen men. He cut up the bodies of his victims, dissolved the flesh, stored the skulls, kept body parts in his refrigerator, and engaged in cannibalism. Dahmer lived in a run down apartment building on 25th Street north of Kilbourn, only two blocks away from Metropolitan.
On the day following Dahmer’s arrest, the Milwaukee Sentinal frontpage headline blasted in larger than usual bold black letters: “Human Body Parts Found in Apartment.”
I was stunned by the headline. It could have been written about me. I thought how ironic it was that I, too, once had in my apartment body parts from human beings who had been killed. The difference, of course, was that I hoped to confer dignity upon those bodies, while Dahmer denigrated the remains of those human beings whom he drugged, used first for his pleasure and then annihilated. The media and then the world was totally appalled by what Dahmer had done and readily exposed his storage of body parts as an atrocity–a further denigration of his victims. If the media had known about the body parts in my apartment, I would have been treated as a pro-lifer with a ghoulish obsession or weird fetish that only a pro-life fanatic like myself could have. To the media the actual victims of the aborted unborn would have been of little or of no consequence at all, since they are not considered persons and it is legal to kill them.
Edmund and I placed the small casket in the back seat of my car and drove the short distance from our apartments to Metropolitan, which was open for business that Saturday morning. We placed the infant’s coffin on the sidewalk a few feet from the door of the abortion clinic. We were not doing this to be vindictive. Edmund and I felt it was important that Sender, Woodward and the abortion clinic workers be confronted by the remains of the human beings they had helped to kill. The victims of Metropolitan had been shipped to a lab where they were literally treated like trash. But when we placed the bodies of those human beings on the doorstep of the abortion center where they had been killed, the abortionists and their workers could not so easily dismiss them. They thought they had shipped them out of the clinic and out of their thoughts–as if these unborn children had never existed.
Edmund stood next to the coffin while I stood on the sidewalk nearby. I held in my arms a duct-taped, tattered box. It was one of the boxes from the Vital Med loading dock that Metropolitan had shipped the fetal remains in.
The initials “MMS” were in the upper left corner of the box with the return address of the abortion clinic.
A police squad pulled into the parking lot; a policeman came out and stood on the sidewalk. A few minutes later, a dark-haired woman, in her early forties and wearing nurses whites, stepped out of the abortion clinic. It was Susan Corrone, the manager of Metropolitan. To pro-lifers she displayed a hard, no-nonsense, humorless personality. I saw her take the few steps over to the little coffin. She bent over slightly and peered for a second at the tiny broken bodies. She shook her head while pursing her lips.
“Nope, those aren’t ours,” she said.
“Oh, yes they are, Susan,” I said as I walked over to her carrying the Metropolitan box.
I stopped several feet from her and pointed to the box.
“Maybe you don’t recognize the babies, but you might recognize the box they were shipped in.”
A puzzled and apprehensive look came over her. She walked over to me and looked at the box closely and saw the return address.
“Well, I think I’ll take that. That’s our property,” she said.
Susan grabbed the box, and she and I tussled over it for a brief second.
“Officer, this woman has clinic property. Tell her to return it,” Susan yelled, now very obviously upset.
She succeeded in wrenching the box from my grasp. The officer came over quickly but seemed confused about what to do. I expected he would immediately set out to take charge and wield his authority.
I explained: “Officer, she says I’m in possession of clinic property; but this was a box that the abortion clinic threw in the trash that contained aborted babies. I took the box and the babies out of the trash.” I then turned to Susan, who had taken a few steps toward the side door of the clinic, looking as if she hoped to whisk herself and the box inside.
I shouted: “Susan it won’t do you any good to take that box. I have more where that one came from.”
To my utter surprise, the officer ordered Susan to give the box back to me. I was not used to police officers siding with pro-lifers.
“I think this is her box now,” he said.
Susan came over and begrudgingly put the box back into my hands.
Several days prior to the aborted babies’ funeral, I had called, Thomas Wiseman, the owner of Brett Funeral Home and asked if he would help us with this burial. Motivated by his Catholic convictions, Wiseman arranged to have six, white child-sized coffins donated by the Milwaukee Casket Company; he also provided the use of three black hearses. On Friday, the day before the burial, Edmund and I and two friends had gone to the funeral home to place the bodies of the twelve hundred aborted babies in the coffins. I felt ill at ease in the small back room where we were escorted to carry out this burdensome task. I felt I had intruded upon a place that was meant to be forever hidden and secret. The back rooms were strange and foreign and pathetically drab. I had been to many funeral homes to attend the wakes of friends and relatives. One sees the elegant furniture, draperies and lush carpeting of the funeral parlors. I fully realized how immersed in death my life had become as I was taken past those outer rooms and into into the stark, gray place where the dead were prepared for burial. I was jarred by the sight of the corpse of a fully-grown man who lay on a gurney against one of the walls of the room. Except for his head he was covered by a clean white sheet. A plastic curtain was drawn, but only partially concealed him.
With care we took the tiny bodies of the aborted unborn out of their cardboard cradles, stained with blood and formalin, and laid them in the the five white coffins–the only other cradles they would ever know.
Now, after Susanne Corrone returned the box to me, I got back into my car and drove to The Brett Funeral Home. A reporter from the Milwaukee Journal and a photographer from United Press International were going to meet me there at 9:30. When I arrived, Patrick Jasperse, the Journal reporter, was waiting for me in the parking lot. The back seat of my Celica was loaded to the brim with empty cardboard boxes from Vital Med; each one bore the return address of the abortion clinic from whence it had come. I wanted the media to see the boxes, if not the actual babies themselves, as proof that indeed we were in possession of aborted babies and that indeed aborted babies were being buried that day. I wanted the victims of abortion to be as real as possible for the press. I showed Jasperse the boxes.
When we entered the funeral home, the five coffins were set out in one of the parlors. Jasperse observed the coffins briefly, made a few notes, shook my hand and said he would see me later at the burial. Soon a very young, short, dark-haired man came into the home toting a camera. The UPI photographer seemed far more interested in the bodies of the children. He took several photos of the coffins laid out in the parlor. I offered to open the lid of one of the coffins because I wanted the press to see the bodies. He said, “yes” that he would like to see them. When I opened the lid of one coffin, filled with hundreds of dark-red, blood-colored whirl pacs, he nearly gasped. This young photo journalist was astonished.
I picked up one of the whirl-pacs and showed him the small feet of an unborn child that were plainly visible through the plastic. He took some photos of the open coffin and then left.
The wake service for the children began at eleven A.M. It was held at Trinity Lutheran Church, which is a Milwaukee landmark–a beautiful, old-style, German- gothic structure. Four tall stained glass windows adorn the sanctuary space. When I entered the church I was struck by the brilliance of the windows, their colors stunning against the church’s dark carved wood. High above the sanctuary was another stained glass window that showed Jesus holding and blessing little children. By eleven o’clock the church was filled with about five hundred mourners. Edmund had brought one of the coffins into the church. With the other fetal remains from Metropolitan, he had placed the largest of the aborted babies we had retrieved from Vital Med–a very well-developed unborn baby killed in the sixth month of gestation. His hands and feet, not yet covered with baby fat, looked like those of an adult but in miniature. Like the very large baby we had retrived from the Michigan Avenue Medical Center, there was nothing to identify who this child was or where he had come from. Edmund placed the open coffin on the bottom step of the sanctuary. Several mourners slowly filed past it. From high in the choir loft in the rear of the church, a beautiful soprano voice rang out a Catholic hymn written for the Lenten season: “O come and mourn with me a while. See Mary calls us to her side. O come and let us mourn with her. Jesus, Our Love, is crucified!” The song continued and the five white children’s coffins slowly were brought into the church and carried up the center aisle. The solemn procession was a step into a new sorrow made manifest in these kinds of burials–a sorrow–until now–the world had not known.
How odd to think that in the five coffins were the bodies of almost three times as many people as sat in the pews. Greg Gesch read Psalm 94:
… Your people, O Lord, they trample down,
your inheritance they afflict.
Widow and stranger they slay, the
fatherless they murder, And they say, “The Lord sees not;
the God of Jacob perceives not.”
Understand you senseless ones
among the people;
and you fools, when will you be wise?
Shall he who shaped the ear not hear?
or he who formed the eye not see?
Pastor Ferdinand Bahr from Divine Shepherd Lutheran Church delivered the sermon based upon Luke 18: 15-17, “Suffer the little children to come to me.” When the service was completed, the coffins were taken in procession out of the church. Edmund carried the small wooden one, and I followed behind. When we left the church, we were bathed in sunlight. The coffins were placed in the waiting hearses.
One hundred cars lined up for a two-mile stretch behind the three hearses. With motorcycle police escorts, the procession slowly wound its way through the streets of Milwaukee. At several intersections, oncoming traffic had to be halted to allow the procession to pass. How ironic, I thought, that now the world had to wait for the babies. A world that was not bothered about them while they lived now had to wait for them to pass in their deaths.
Spectators watched bewildered by the scene. One man standing on a street corner was heard to exclaim, “Man!
Whoever this guy was, he had to be rich!” Another onlooker asked one of the police escorts, “Who died?” The policeman shook his head and answered, “No one.”
Hundreds of additional mourners had gathered at the gravesite. The service began with gospel hymns sung by a black choir from Gospel Lighthouse Church. Father Gene Jakubek, S.J., a priest well known in Milwaukee for his help to the poor, read the gospel and delivered the graveside eulogy. He read from Matthew 25: “I assure you, whatsoever you did to the least of my brothers you did unto me.” Fr. Jakubek told those gathered to continue their fight to end the “holocaust of abortion.”
A woman who stood behind me introduced herself. She said she had had an abortion several years ago. “I’m offering this memorial service for my own baby.”
Msgr. Fabian Bruskewitz, the pastor of my parish, St. Bernard’s, stepped forward and blessed the coffins and the graves with holy water. Years later Bruskewitz would become the bishop of Lincoln, Nebraska.
When the ceremony was over, Edmund and a few other men lowered the coffins into the twelve-by-six foot mass grave. It seemed appropriate that these babies share the same final resting place. Many of them died on the same day, in the same place and at the hands of the same abortionist. The injustice of abortion had woven their lives together. And a mass grave for aborted children stands as a symbol to society.
Local media coverage of the burial was extensive and, for the most part, surprisingly, favorable. The story done by the NBC affiliate was even poignant. The two-minute piece appeared more like a mini-movie than a news story. It was completely void of derisive comments. The reporter acted more like a narrator of the event. The Channel 4 coverage began with the five white children’s coffins being carried into the church. Pastor Bahr was taped giving his sermon and the camera then focused on the faces of some of those in the pews. Two women were weeping. The next shot showed the coffins being placed in the hearses while the church bells chimed their low, solemn tone. A few people who attended the wake service were asked why they had come, and the story concluded by showing the burial service at the cemetery with a voice-over saying “the organizers say they are doing this to promote the sanctity of human life.”
Strangely absent from the story were the expected interviews with Planned Parenthood officials, the ACLU, or abortion clinic workers who would have said that what we were doing was a shameful media circus or that we were violating the rights of women. In all of my pro-life experience, this short piece was the most sympathetic coverage of an abortion-related event I had ever seen.
After the burial, Roseanne St. Aubin from the CBS affiliate station interviewed me at the cemetery. All of the reporters who covered the burial referred to the aborted babies as “fetuses.” They were never called “unborn babies” or “unborn children.” The secular press believes the impersonal word “fetus” is somehow neutral. Roseanne St. Aubin once even referred to the fetal remains as “tissue” when she stated “the organizers [of the burial] would not give details on how the tissues were acquired.” The Channel 6 reporter also stated:
“Migliorino said names of the women who had the abortions were on the bags containing the fetuses but those names were buried along with the fetuses buried today and the group kept no records…
It’s not clear whether members of the group could be or would be prosecuted for the way the fetuses were acquired. Migliorino was not afraid of the possibility.”
I was shown saying: “We performed an act of charity for these children. The wrongness occurred when they threw them in the trash.”
Roseanne St. Aubin’s remark about the possibility of prosecution was prescient. Six months later, on March 23, 1989, I was sent a summons informing me that I was being sued by the National Organization for Women in the NOW v. Scheidler R.I.C.O case. Not only our rescues, but now even our retrieval of aborted babies and their funerals amounted to acts of extortion since these acts allegedly were designed to close down abortion clinics. The fifty-page amended complaint described our retrieval of the bodies as “a ghoulish plot to steal laboratory specimens.” NOW accused us of making threats to reveal the names of the women whose aborted babies we had “stolen.” But we never intended to make their names known, nor did we ever threaten to do so.
It was at this time that the complaint was amended to add Randall Terry to the lawsuit as well as Tim Murphy, Andy Scholberg and Conrad Wojnar. Under a weird theory that Vital Med was in league with us, NOW even named the Northbrook lab as a defendant. Joan Andrews and John Ryan originally were defendants but NOW voluntarily dropped both Joan and John from the lawsuit. The rogue defendant Vital Med was also voluntarily removed. Owned by Dr. Samuel Shih, Vital Med closed soon after the lawsuit was initiated against the clinic. I resented that Vital Med was named as a defendant. Except for the mysterious Vital Med employee, the lab was in league with the abortion clinics, not with us. At one of the depositions I told Vital Med’s attorney, “Your client was throwing the bodies of human beings in the trash. It doesn’t deserve to be a defendant in this case.”
A month after the Milwaukee burial Edmund, Dan Zeidler and I went to the cemetery to take care of some paper work about the gravesite and the placement of the tombstone. We stopped by the babies’ grave to say some prayers. The infant section of Holy Cross is a very special place. The tombstone inscriptions express the great love parents have for their children. One does not find on adult markers the same heart-felt expressions of love, affection and sorrow. The dates on the stones reveal that some of the babies died on the day they were born. Some of the inscriptions read: “Our angel, with us for a moment–with God for eternity,” “Jesus adopted our son–Mommy and Daddy love baby,” “Our treasure lies here,” and “Tread softly–a dream lies buried here.” The stones, like silent sentinels, have frozen into them the sorrow of parental loss.
Ironically, it was among children who were loved, wanted and given names that the aborted babies found a final home. Their grave, larger than the others, and not yet covered with sod, was easy to find. Thirteen silk roses, left by Edmund after the burial, covered the top of the grave. Many of the other children’s graves had small toys placed on them by parents. I was glad to see one left for the aborted babies, a stuffed toy rabbit wrapped in plastic to protect it from the rain. Through the plastic we saw a folded piece of paper fastened to the paw of the bunny with a rubber band. Overcome by curiosity, we carefully unwrapped the toy to investigate.
As Edmund stooped over the grave, Dan and I hovered over him. Edmund unwrapped the note and unfolded it. As I read the note, I began to weep. The note was written in a swirly, feminine hand. It was the cry of a mother to the baby she had aborted:
“Please forgive me and maybe someday I can forgive myself… I’ll always wonder what you would have been, what you would have become. I can’t stop hating myself right now, regretting the hardest decision I’ve ever made in my life, wishing I could do it differently now. But I can’t. I will always remember this. It was a tough lesson to have to learn…I pray to God and to you to forgive me so I can go on with my life and I swear to both you and the Lord that I will never ever do it again. Please forgive me so I can let go and go on!”
Edmund refolded the note, bound it back onto the rabbit’s paw and placed the toy back inside its plastic shroud.
The Milwaukee Journal had printed that the “fetuses” were aborted in 1988 at the Summit Women’s Health Organization and Metropolitan Medical Services. The woman’s note seemed to indicate she believed her child was buried in this grave. Her note expressed her sense of having abandoned the baby. She knew this deep within herself. By burying the baby we had returned him to his mother. The burial gave the aborted unborn a human place in the world. In the woman’s letter to her baby, the awful tearing of human bonds caused by abortion knew a more perfect healing.
The woman’s cry was not uttered in vain. On the reverse side of the note someone had written a reply.
“God’s love is the heart of a child. He hopes where we can only despair. Go in peace–you are forgiven. And you must believe this…”
Beyond abortion stands a mother at the edge of her child’s grave. On a lonely day, one woman had come to this site, and her act of love banished the lie of abortion. In her sorrow the order of the world, rooted in human bonds, was affirmed. From out of all the nameless, faceless children buried there, the woman claimed back to herself the one who was her own.
Note: This story was provided by Priests for Life
This chapter has been edited due to length.
Chapter Eighteen
The Funeral for “No One”
“To forget murder victims is to kill them twice.”
(Elie Weisel)
. . .
Those involved with the retrievals decided that the best course of action was to obtain as many bodies of the aborted babies as possible and then, after a large number were in our possession, begin the arrangements for their burials. It would have been difficult, very time consuming and expensive to bury bodies every two or three weeks as they were accumulated. Besides, we firmly believed that the babies deserved a real funeral with a real graveside ceremony. We did not want to repeatedly put bodies into the ground when services for them would have been difficult to arrange every time. We were also resolved not to allow the babies to be buried in haste and secrecy as had happened with the bodies from the Michigan Avenue Medical Center.
This time, the burials of the victims of abortion would be well-planned, well-attended, and very well- advertised.
Edmund and I had told John Cavanaugh-O’Keefe about the aborted baby find and that we were in possession of thousands of bodies. In 1986 and 1987, when he worked for Human Life International, John retrieved four hundred and fifty bodies of aborted babies from Washington D.C. abortion centers. John was opposed to mass burials. He believed that each unborn child should be granted an individual burial because the brief period of their lives was not the criteria by which their personhood was measured. Each unborn child was a unique member of the human race, and John wanted to recognize the unique personhood of each of these fetal children and not just have them buried anonymously together. Moreover, John, a former anti-war activist, believed that what we did with the unborn (living and dead) foreshadowed what we would do with the rest of the world in terms of peace. If we buried the babies in mass graves what kind of world violence were we preparing for? What kind of world violence were we willing to accept?
I wanted very much to do what John urged and give each child an individual burial so that each child’s personal existence and humanity could be honored. If I had had only a dozen bodies, or fifty, or a hundred or maybe even three hundred, perhaps it could have been done. We would have found three hundred individual pro-lifers all over the country who would have organized three hundred funerals.
But we had literally thousands of bodies. Edmund and I had retrieved over two thousand of them. Tim Murphy and the other Chicago activists had approximately three thousand. By the time our retrieval efforts came to an end, over 5000 bodies were in need of burial. To communicate with over 5000 pro-lifers and ship the bodies to them was a massive undertaking. It probably meant that we would do no other pro-life work except arrange for the burials of the aborted unborn for months to come. I did not want to be in the funeral business forever.
Edmund and I were set upon one thing, which was a sort of compromise with what John had hoped for. We knew the particular cities where the babies had been aborted and we thought it only right that the babies be buried in the cities where they may have been brought into life and where they certainly had been killed.
We contacted pro-lifers in Raleigh, Fargo, Fort Wayne, Fairfield, and Wilmington. We tried to arrange to have the bodies transported by car to the various cities and states, since we believed that transport through the mail or United Parcel Service was not in keeping with the dignity of the bodies. That is how they had been shipped to the loading dock by the abortion clinic workers. The only bodies shipped parcel post were those killed in Raleigh. In July, 1988, Edmund drove his super Beetle six hundred miles to Philadelphia and gave Joe Foreman, who was living there at the time, two hundred bodies of aborted babies. These bodies were of unborn babies killed at the New Jersey Women’s Health Organization and the Delaware Women’s Health Organization. The bodies were then given to pro-lifers from those states. Not wanting to spend Citizens for Life’s money, Edmund had pawned his guitar to finance his Philadelphia excursion.
The unborn killed in Raleigh by Dr. Marx were buried at a cemetery in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The funeral was organized by John Cavanaugh-O’Keefe’s sister, Lucy O’Keefe.
I made arrangements with Charlene Crommit of the Diocese of Fargo’s Respect Life Office to have the Fargo babies transported back there. One hundred and forty unborn babies killed in Fargo, North Dakota were placed in one small infant’s coffin and sent by jet to that city. The transport by jet had been paid for by the Fargo diocese and the small white coffin was met by a representative of the bishop of the Fargo diocese, John Sullivan. The transport by jet had been arranged by Brent Funeral Home in Milwaukee just as the body of any human being is transported for burial. (In hindsight, all of the bodies of aborted babies should have been delivered this way.) In Fargo, Bishop James Sullivan personally led the burial service for the fetal children.
Several years ago, Joe Scheidler and I sat at a table in a Burger King on Clark Street in Chicago. Several other pro-lifers sat with us or at tables nearby. We had been testifying at hearings called by Cook County Board president George Dunne, who sought to end the practice of abortion at Cook County Hospital. There was a break in the proceedings, so our large gang of pro-lifers all traipsed to the Burger King for lunch.
Over burgers, fries and sodas Joe narrated how he witnessed the birth of his second daughter, Annie. As he told the story, Joe’s face sparkled with joy. “After seeing this little life come out of the womb–my own little daughter–I never felt such happiness. I felt like I was levitating. It was then that I realized that to attack an innocent child inside its mother’s womb was the closest thing to killing God.”
Perhaps Joe’s insight was founded in coming to know how abortion attacks what is sacred in man–a sacredness that comes from God. Furthermore, to attack the developing child in his mother’s womb is an attack on the order of God’s creation. Abortion not only kills a human being; it also undoes the bonds of human communion. It is in human unity and the intrinsic inter-relatedness of persons that man knows and experiences God’s own love. God centered the order of creation in the unity of human persons: man and woman, husband and wife, mother and child. Abortion unravels human bonds–indeed wrenches those bonds apart and thus is an attempt to unravel creation.
Just beyond a closed door in my apartment lay the dismembered bodies of unborn children. I began to know their isolation and to understand that the aborted child’s isolation is caused by the triumph of another individual in isolation–the lonely monadic self who must secure its own identity and power by suppressing or annihilating all who threaten to be in relation to it. Here lay these silent bodies in the hands of a stranger in a strange place, who had taken them from a loading dock. They were apart from their mothers. Apart and distant from their fathers. Apart from the towns where they had been conceived. In them I knew the denial of man’s most intrinsic bonds. Roe v. Wade was based on the premise, indeed on the philosophy, that the woman stands alone. Abortion isolates a woman from all other human beings in the world. Under Roe no one–not parents, boyfriend or husband–has any claim upon the woman and her baby. The power needed to accomplish such a radical, ultimate separation between the woman and her child is achieved by the woman’s isolating herself from all others in the world who, inherently, do stand in relation to her. The promoters of legal abortion do tout it as “a private decision between a woman and her physician.” And there is truth in this point of view. The isolated woman necessarily makes a compact with a nameless stranger. Most often, even in legal abortion the woman may not even know the physician’s name and may never have seen him before. Most likely the woman will never see him again. There is no real relation between the abortion-bound woman and the person who will kill her baby. The abortionist is a kind of high priest who presides over a ritual of alienation.
. . .
In June, 1988, Joe Scheidler sat down at a table with Joseph Cardinal Bernardin in a room at the archdiocesan chancery office located on Superior Street in the posh north end of the Chicago Loop. Joe, with other pro-life leaders who attended the meeting, wanted to discuss frustrations the pro-life community had with the diocese and Bernardin’s own lack of hard-core involvement in the anti-abortion struggle. For years Catholics in the archdiocese active in the pro-life cause had felt that they were very much on their own. Few priests provided encouragement; some indeed, were hostile to pro-life initiatives and the archdiocese provided very little institutional Church backing for pro-life activist work. Joe and the other pro-life leaders who attended the meeting hoped to initiate a change. At the meeting, Joe suggested ways Bernardin himself could become more involved. Joe told him there were aborted babies that needed to be buried and asked the cardinal if he would officiate at the burial himself. The cardinal agreed.
On a sunny and warm July 30, 1988, I drove with two friends from Milwaukee to Queen of Heaven cemetery in Hillside, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago. We parked the car and walked to the small chapel located in the mausoleum. A hearse was parked in the circular drive outside of the chapel; inside it were two large, beige-colored and exceptionally ornate adult caskets. They contained the bodies of the two thousand aborted babies to be buried that day. We entered the chapel, and I took a seat in a pew near the front reserved for those who had helped take the bodies out of the trash. I saw Joe Scheidler, Tim Murphy, Jerry McCarthy, Brian Pabich and Peter Krump. In another ten minutes the chapel was filled to overflowing, and the funeral Mass soon began. Bernardin was the primary celebrant and the homilist. After the Mass the mourners returned to their cars and followed the hearse through the winding streets of the cemetery until it came to a plot at the extreme west end. The caskets were unloaded from the hearse and placed on transport tables with castors. I and the others who were involved with the retrieval acted as pall bearers to the grave site.
Bernardin was standing near the open ground, and Fr. Coughlin stood near him. Soon six hundred people gathered around to join in the burial ceremony. There were also several TV cameras and photographers and journalists present. Bernardin blessed the ground, blessed the caskets and offered prayers for the dead. In a matter of moments the ceremony was over.
Indeed, everything was perfect. The Mass and burial were marked with the greatest dignity and solemnity. The caskets seemed suitable for royalty. And most important, the burial was public. That day the victims of abortion were not buried in haste and in secret.
Indeed, Bernardin took some flack for officiating at the burial. Colleen Connell of the American Civil Liberties Union who had criticized our on-the-street press conference a year earlier, now criticized the cardinal in a Chicago Tribune story:
He allowed himself to be used in a shameless publicity stunt. It’s one thing for the cardinal to say the Catholic Church is opposed to abortion.
But it’s quite another for him to participate in an action which demeans the personal privacy and integrity of women who may or may not be church members.
Perhaps Connell would have been satisfied if the fetal remains had been left in the trash. She also failed to consider that some women, indeed perhaps quite a few, would be comforted to know that their unborn baby was given a humane burial. Connell also questioned whether laws had been broken by those of us who “provided the fetuses.”
Bernardin told the reporter that he did not ask where the babies had come from and did not know what the legal ramifications might be but stated that “they would pale into insignificance when compared to the taking of innocent human life. I knew what I was doing, and what I was doing was a corporal work of mercy done in a very beautiful religious ceremony.”
[Miller then discusses another burial ceremony]
Prayers were said, hymns sung and then finally the six coffins were placed in the ground. We did not want to leave the actual burial for the cemetery grounds crew. We wanted to bury the babies ourselves to make it a more personal act. A young man lowered himself down into the massive grave. Greg Gesch and another young man passed the coffins down to him. Soon all of the coffins lay at the bottom of this deep, red-earthen hole.
The young man was pulled out. I took one long last look at the coffins below me. We then took turns shoveling the red clay into the grave until it was filled.
Local media coverage was extensive. A huge photo of the burial dominated the front page of the August 6th Tallahassee Democrat. We were stunned and delighted to see it. The photo was exceptionally poignant. It showed the young man in the grave with his arms outstretched to receive a coffin. It was beautiful. The Jacksonville Journal published a well-balanced article with photos–except the headline read “Pro-lifers bury caskets in protest” and stated that we “said [the caskets] contained the remains of aborted fetuses.” The article gave the impression that perhaps we were burying empty coffins!
The next morning one-hundred and thirty-one pro-lifers, including me, blocked the door to the North Florida Women’s Health and Counseling Services. Susan Brindle, Joan’s sister, was arrested as she held her two year old daughter Peggy. Tom Herlihy, Father Robert Pearson, Joe Wall and Ed Martin were also arrested. With sixty other women, I spent two nights in the Leon County jail. In the meantime Edmund and his family, with a small contingent of friends, buried nine of the aborted babies in ground set aside as a cemetery on land the Miller family owned near their home in Lloyd.
When we returned home from our Florida trip, final preparations were made for the burial of aborted babies in Milwaukee. The day of the burial, Saturday, September 10th, was very warm and sunny. The burial was well-advertised. Citizens for Life had sent out a large mailing; and there were two ads in the Catholic Herald, the archdiocesan newspaper, as well as a small ad in the Milwaukee Journal.
The Christian radio station, WVCY, had made several announcements about the burial in the preceding weeks. I expected this funeral to be well-attended.
Edmund and I awoke very early. We placed seven aborted babies in one of the wooden white coffins that he had made. We took these seven out of the whirl-pacs and actually assembled the small broken limbs. They were bodies of aborted babies killed at the Metropolitan Medical Services. Metropolitan occupied a small, two- story modern, non-descript building near the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and 27th St. Its east wall butted up against the west wall of a Marquette University co-ed dormitory. It always bothered me that Marquette as an institution, and the students themselves, seemed oblivious to the killing of the unborn that occurred right next door to them. Years earlier the Christian Radio station, WVCY, had first broadcast from that building. Vic Eliason, the founder of WVCY, was always saddened when he thought of what was going on in the building now. after Metropolitan moved into the building a karate studio rented the second floor but it had long since moved out. Abortions were done in the basement.
Metropolitan was one of the few places that could strictly be called an abortion clinic. Nothing else was done there.
When it first opened, just after the Roe v. Wade decision, three doctors took turns doing the abortions: Neville Sender (born in England), George Woodward and Nathan Hilrich. Without explanation, Hilrich quit doing abortions in 1987. Of the three-man team, Sender was certainly the most committed to the abortion practice, with Woodward a close second. In the late 1980′s both Sender and Woodward were in their mid to late sixties. Sender had boasted in the Milwaukee Journal that he had performed illegal abortions before Roe v. Wade He also shocked pro-lifers when, in reference to abortion, he told the Journal: “Of course we know it’s killing but the state permits killing in certain circumstances.”
. . .
Metropolitan was located in a shabby section of the near-downtown area. It was in an integrated neighborhood with commercial businesses, lots of apartment buildings, and old homes in obvious need of paint and repair. Carol Robbins was one of the most faithful sidewalk counselors at Metropolitan. She could be seen standing in front of the building nearly every day that the abortion center was open. On a warm summer day in 1991, a good-looking young man walked past the clinic. He stopped for a moment to look at Carol’s picket sign which displayed photos of aborted babies in the first trimester. Carol went over to him and gave him some pro-life literature which also showed aborted babies.
The young man looked at the pictures.
“What do you think about that?,” Carol asked him.
“Hum, the man said, “It makes me hungry.”
Three weeks later, on Monday, July 22, 1991, the young man was arrested. When Carol saw the television news clips about his arrest, she gasped. The man was Jeffrey Dahmer who, over a period of thirteen years, had killed seventeen men. He cut up the bodies of his victims, dissolved the flesh, stored the skulls, kept body parts in his refrigerator, and engaged in cannibalism. Dahmer lived in a run down apartment building on 25th Street north of Kilbourn, only two blocks away from Metropolitan.
On the day following Dahmer’s arrest, the Milwaukee Sentinal frontpage headline blasted in larger than usual bold black letters: “Human Body Parts Found in Apartment.”
I was stunned by the headline. It could have been written about me. I thought how ironic it was that I, too, once had in my apartment body parts from human beings who had been killed. The difference, of course, was that I hoped to confer dignity upon those bodies, while Dahmer denigrated the remains of those human beings whom he drugged, used first for his pleasure and then annihilated. The media and then the world was totally appalled by what Dahmer had done and readily exposed his storage of body parts as an atrocity–a further denigration of his victims. If the media had known about the body parts in my apartment, I would have been treated as a pro-lifer with a ghoulish obsession or weird fetish that only a pro-life fanatic like myself could have. To the media the actual victims of the aborted unborn would have been of little or of no consequence at all, since they are not considered persons and it is legal to kill them.
Edmund and I placed the small casket in the back seat of my car and drove the short distance from our apartments to Metropolitan, which was open for business that Saturday morning. We placed the infant’s coffin on the sidewalk a few feet from the door of the abortion clinic. We were not doing this to be vindictive. Edmund and I felt it was important that Sender, Woodward and the abortion clinic workers be confronted by the remains of the human beings they had helped to kill. The victims of Metropolitan had been shipped to a lab where they were literally treated like trash. But when we placed the bodies of those human beings on the doorstep of the abortion center where they had been killed, the abortionists and their workers could not so easily dismiss them. They thought they had shipped them out of the clinic and out of their thoughts–as if these unborn children had never existed.
Edmund stood next to the coffin while I stood on the sidewalk nearby. I held in my arms a duct-taped, tattered box. It was one of the boxes from the Vital Med loading dock that Metropolitan had shipped the fetal remains in.
The initials “MMS” were in the upper left corner of the box with the return address of the abortion clinic.
A police squad pulled into the parking lot; a policeman came out and stood on the sidewalk. A few minutes later, a dark-haired woman, in her early forties and wearing nurses whites, stepped out of the abortion clinic. It was Susan Corrone, the manager of Metropolitan. To pro-lifers she displayed a hard, no-nonsense, humorless personality. I saw her take the few steps over to the little coffin. She bent over slightly and peered for a second at the tiny broken bodies. She shook her head while pursing her lips.
“Nope, those aren’t ours,” she said.
“Oh, yes they are, Susan,” I said as I walked over to her carrying the Metropolitan box.
I stopped several feet from her and pointed to the box.
“Maybe you don’t recognize the babies, but you might recognize the box they were shipped in.”
A puzzled and apprehensive look came over her. She walked over to me and looked at the box closely and saw the return address.
“Well, I think I’ll take that. That’s our property,” she said.
Susan grabbed the box, and she and I tussled over it for a brief second.
“Officer, this woman has clinic property. Tell her to return it,” Susan yelled, now very obviously upset.
She succeeded in wrenching the box from my grasp. The officer came over quickly but seemed confused about what to do. I expected he would immediately set out to take charge and wield his authority.
I explained: “Officer, she says I’m in possession of clinic property; but this was a box that the abortion clinic threw in the trash that contained aborted babies. I took the box and the babies out of the trash.” I then turned to Susan, who had taken a few steps toward the side door of the clinic, looking as if she hoped to whisk herself and the box inside.
I shouted: “Susan it won’t do you any good to take that box. I have more where that one came from.”
To my utter surprise, the officer ordered Susan to give the box back to me. I was not used to police officers siding with pro-lifers.
“I think this is her box now,” he said.
Susan came over and begrudgingly put the box back into my hands.
Several days prior to the aborted babies’ funeral, I had called, Thomas Wiseman, the owner of Brett Funeral Home and asked if he would help us with this burial. Motivated by his Catholic convictions, Wiseman arranged to have six, white child-sized coffins donated by the Milwaukee Casket Company; he also provided the use of three black hearses. On Friday, the day before the burial, Edmund and I and two friends had gone to the funeral home to place the bodies of the twelve hundred aborted babies in the coffins. I felt ill at ease in the small back room where we were escorted to carry out this burdensome task. I felt I had intruded upon a place that was meant to be forever hidden and secret. The back rooms were strange and foreign and pathetically drab. I had been to many funeral homes to attend the wakes of friends and relatives. One sees the elegant furniture, draperies and lush carpeting of the funeral parlors. I fully realized how immersed in death my life had become as I was taken past those outer rooms and into into the stark, gray place where the dead were prepared for burial. I was jarred by the sight of the corpse of a fully-grown man who lay on a gurney against one of the walls of the room. Except for his head he was covered by a clean white sheet. A plastic curtain was drawn, but only partially concealed him.
With care we took the tiny bodies of the aborted unborn out of their cardboard cradles, stained with blood and formalin, and laid them in the the five white coffins–the only other cradles they would ever know.
Now, after Susanne Corrone returned the box to me, I got back into my car and drove to The Brett Funeral Home. A reporter from the Milwaukee Journal and a photographer from United Press International were going to meet me there at 9:30. When I arrived, Patrick Jasperse, the Journal reporter, was waiting for me in the parking lot. The back seat of my Celica was loaded to the brim with empty cardboard boxes from Vital Med; each one bore the return address of the abortion clinic from whence it had come. I wanted the media to see the boxes, if not the actual babies themselves, as proof that indeed we were in possession of aborted babies and that indeed aborted babies were being buried that day. I wanted the victims of abortion to be as real as possible for the press. I showed Jasperse the boxes.
When we entered the funeral home, the five coffins were set out in one of the parlors. Jasperse observed the coffins briefly, made a few notes, shook my hand and said he would see me later at the burial. Soon a very young, short, dark-haired man came into the home toting a camera. The UPI photographer seemed far more interested in the bodies of the children. He took several photos of the coffins laid out in the parlor. I offered to open the lid of one of the coffins because I wanted the press to see the bodies. He said, “yes” that he would like to see them. When I opened the lid of one coffin, filled with hundreds of dark-red, blood-colored whirl pacs, he nearly gasped. This young photo journalist was astonished.
I picked up one of the whirl-pacs and showed him the small feet of an unborn child that were plainly visible through the plastic. He took some photos of the open coffin and then left.
The wake service for the children began at eleven A.M. It was held at Trinity Lutheran Church, which is a Milwaukee landmark–a beautiful, old-style, German- gothic structure. Four tall stained glass windows adorn the sanctuary space. When I entered the church I was struck by the brilliance of the windows, their colors stunning against the church’s dark carved wood. High above the sanctuary was another stained glass window that showed Jesus holding and blessing little children. By eleven o’clock the church was filled with about five hundred mourners. Edmund had brought one of the coffins into the church. With the other fetal remains from Metropolitan, he had placed the largest of the aborted babies we had retrieved from Vital Med–a very well-developed unborn baby killed in the sixth month of gestation. His hands and feet, not yet covered with baby fat, looked like those of an adult but in miniature. Like the very large baby we had retrived from the Michigan Avenue Medical Center, there was nothing to identify who this child was or where he had come from. Edmund placed the open coffin on the bottom step of the sanctuary. Several mourners slowly filed past it. From high in the choir loft in the rear of the church, a beautiful soprano voice rang out a Catholic hymn written for the Lenten season: “O come and mourn with me a while. See Mary calls us to her side. O come and let us mourn with her. Jesus, Our Love, is crucified!” The song continued and the five white children’s coffins slowly were brought into the church and carried up the center aisle. The solemn procession was a step into a new sorrow made manifest in these kinds of burials–a sorrow–until now–the world had not known.
How odd to think that in the five coffins were the bodies of almost three times as many people as sat in the pews. Greg Gesch read Psalm 94:
… Your people, O Lord, they trample down,
your inheritance they afflict.
Widow and stranger they slay, the
fatherless they murder, And they say, “The Lord sees not;
the God of Jacob perceives not.”
Understand you senseless ones
among the people;
and you fools, when will you be wise?
Shall he who shaped the ear not hear?
or he who formed the eye not see?
Pastor Ferdinand Bahr from Divine Shepherd Lutheran Church delivered the sermon based upon Luke 18: 15-17, “Suffer the little children to come to me.” When the service was completed, the coffins were taken in procession out of the church. Edmund carried the small wooden one, and I followed behind. When we left the church, we were bathed in sunlight. The coffins were placed in the waiting hearses.
One hundred cars lined up for a two-mile stretch behind the three hearses. With motorcycle police escorts, the procession slowly wound its way through the streets of Milwaukee. At several intersections, oncoming traffic had to be halted to allow the procession to pass. How ironic, I thought, that now the world had to wait for the babies. A world that was not bothered about them while they lived now had to wait for them to pass in their deaths.
Spectators watched bewildered by the scene. One man standing on a street corner was heard to exclaim, “Man!
Whoever this guy was, he had to be rich!” Another onlooker asked one of the police escorts, “Who died?” The policeman shook his head and answered, “No one.”
Hundreds of additional mourners had gathered at the gravesite. The service began with gospel hymns sung by a black choir from Gospel Lighthouse Church. Father Gene Jakubek, S.J., a priest well known in Milwaukee for his help to the poor, read the gospel and delivered the graveside eulogy. He read from Matthew 25: “I assure you, whatsoever you did to the least of my brothers you did unto me.” Fr. Jakubek told those gathered to continue their fight to end the “holocaust of abortion.”
A woman who stood behind me introduced herself. She said she had had an abortion several years ago. “I’m offering this memorial service for my own baby.”
Msgr. Fabian Bruskewitz, the pastor of my parish, St. Bernard’s, stepped forward and blessed the coffins and the graves with holy water. Years later Bruskewitz would become the bishop of Lincoln, Nebraska.
When the ceremony was over, Edmund and a few other men lowered the coffins into the twelve-by-six foot mass grave. It seemed appropriate that these babies share the same final resting place. Many of them died on the same day, in the same place and at the hands of the same abortionist. The injustice of abortion had woven their lives together. And a mass grave for aborted children stands as a symbol to society.
Local media coverage of the burial was extensive and, for the most part, surprisingly, favorable. The story done by the NBC affiliate was even poignant. The two-minute piece appeared more like a mini-movie than a news story. It was completely void of derisive comments. The reporter acted more like a narrator of the event. The Channel 4 coverage began with the five white children’s coffins being carried into the church. Pastor Bahr was taped giving his sermon and the camera then focused on the faces of some of those in the pews. Two women were weeping. The next shot showed the coffins being placed in the hearses while the church bells chimed their low, solemn tone. A few people who attended the wake service were asked why they had come, and the story concluded by showing the burial service at the cemetery with a voice-over saying “the organizers say they are doing this to promote the sanctity of human life.”
Strangely absent from the story were the expected interviews with Planned Parenthood officials, the ACLU, or abortion clinic workers who would have said that what we were doing was a shameful media circus or that we were violating the rights of women. In all of my pro-life experience, this short piece was the most sympathetic coverage of an abortion-related event I had ever seen.
After the burial, Roseanne St. Aubin from the CBS affiliate station interviewed me at the cemetery. All of the reporters who covered the burial referred to the aborted babies as “fetuses.” They were never called “unborn babies” or “unborn children.” The secular press believes the impersonal word “fetus” is somehow neutral. Roseanne St. Aubin once even referred to the fetal remains as “tissue” when she stated “the organizers [of the burial] would not give details on how the tissues were acquired.” The Channel 6 reporter also stated:
“Migliorino said names of the women who had the abortions were on the bags containing the fetuses but those names were buried along with the fetuses buried today and the group kept no records…
It’s not clear whether members of the group could be or would be prosecuted for the way the fetuses were acquired. Migliorino was not afraid of the possibility.”
I was shown saying: “We performed an act of charity for these children. The wrongness occurred when they threw them in the trash.”
Roseanne St. Aubin’s remark about the possibility of prosecution was prescient. Six months later, on March 23, 1989, I was sent a summons informing me that I was being sued by the National Organization for Women in the NOW v. Scheidler R.I.C.O case. Not only our rescues, but now even our retrieval of aborted babies and their funerals amounted to acts of extortion since these acts allegedly were designed to close down abortion clinics. The fifty-page amended complaint described our retrieval of the bodies as “a ghoulish plot to steal laboratory specimens.” NOW accused us of making threats to reveal the names of the women whose aborted babies we had “stolen.” But we never intended to make their names known, nor did we ever threaten to do so.
It was at this time that the complaint was amended to add Randall Terry to the lawsuit as well as Tim Murphy, Andy Scholberg and Conrad Wojnar. Under a weird theory that Vital Med was in league with us, NOW even named the Northbrook lab as a defendant. Joan Andrews and John Ryan originally were defendants but NOW voluntarily dropped both Joan and John from the lawsuit. The rogue defendant Vital Med was also voluntarily removed. Owned by Dr. Samuel Shih, Vital Med closed soon after the lawsuit was initiated against the clinic. I resented that Vital Med was named as a defendant. Except for the mysterious Vital Med employee, the lab was in league with the abortion clinics, not with us. At one of the depositions I told Vital Med’s attorney, “Your client was throwing the bodies of human beings in the trash. It doesn’t deserve to be a defendant in this case.”
A month after the Milwaukee burial Edmund, Dan Zeidler and I went to the cemetery to take care of some paper work about the gravesite and the placement of the tombstone. We stopped by the babies’ grave to say some prayers. The infant section of Holy Cross is a very special place. The tombstone inscriptions express the great love parents have for their children. One does not find on adult markers the same heart-felt expressions of love, affection and sorrow. The dates on the stones reveal that some of the babies died on the day they were born. Some of the inscriptions read: “Our angel, with us for a moment–with God for eternity,” “Jesus adopted our son–Mommy and Daddy love baby,” “Our treasure lies here,” and “Tread softly–a dream lies buried here.” The stones, like silent sentinels, have frozen into them the sorrow of parental loss.
Ironically, it was among children who were loved, wanted and given names that the aborted babies found a final home. Their grave, larger than the others, and not yet covered with sod, was easy to find. Thirteen silk roses, left by Edmund after the burial, covered the top of the grave. Many of the other children’s graves had small toys placed on them by parents. I was glad to see one left for the aborted babies, a stuffed toy rabbit wrapped in plastic to protect it from the rain. Through the plastic we saw a folded piece of paper fastened to the paw of the bunny with a rubber band. Overcome by curiosity, we carefully unwrapped the toy to investigate.
As Edmund stooped over the grave, Dan and I hovered over him. Edmund unwrapped the note and unfolded it. As I read the note, I began to weep. The note was written in a swirly, feminine hand. It was the cry of a mother to the baby she had aborted:
“Please forgive me and maybe someday I can forgive myself… I’ll always wonder what you would have been, what you would have become. I can’t stop hating myself right now, regretting the hardest decision I’ve ever made in my life, wishing I could do it differently now. But I can’t. I will always remember this. It was a tough lesson to have to learn…I pray to God and to you to forgive me so I can go on with my life and I swear to both you and the Lord that I will never ever do it again. Please forgive me so I can let go and go on!”
Edmund refolded the note, bound it back onto the rabbit’s paw and placed the toy back inside its plastic shroud.
The Milwaukee Journal had printed that the “fetuses” were aborted in 1988 at the Summit Women’s Health Organization and Metropolitan Medical Services. The woman’s note seemed to indicate she believed her child was buried in this grave. Her note expressed her sense of having abandoned the baby. She knew this deep within herself. By burying the baby we had returned him to his mother. The burial gave the aborted unborn a human place in the world. In the woman’s letter to her baby, the awful tearing of human bonds caused by abortion knew a more perfect healing.
The woman’s cry was not uttered in vain. On the reverse side of the note someone had written a reply.
“God’s love is the heart of a child. He hopes where we can only despair. Go in peace–you are forgiven. And you must believe this…”
Beyond abortion stands a mother at the edge of her child’s grave. On a lonely day, one woman had come to this site, and her act of love banished the lie of abortion. In her sorrow the order of the world, rooted in human bonds, was affirmed. From out of all the nameless, faceless children buried there, the woman claimed back to herself the one who was her own.
Note: This story was provided by Priests for Life
http://clinicquotes.com/a-funeral-for-no-one/
Sunday, March 16, 2014
Grayson James Walker
Published on May 19, 2012
Grayson James Walker February 15, 2012, parents Patrick & Heather Walker
He only lived 8 hours, but what a huge impact he has had on the lives of thousands of people! Hope you all enjoy meeting and sharing moments with Grayson and his loving, faithful family.
He only lived 8 hours, but what a huge impact he has had on the lives of thousands of people! Hope you all enjoy meeting and sharing moments with Grayson and his loving, faithful family.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Choosing Death, Choosing Life: did being distinctly 'normal' make a difference?- - part 2
CNN) -- A brain-dead pregnant woman lies on a hospital bed. Doctors want to keep her on life support until they can deliver her baby. An anguished husband waits.
At first glance, the case of Robyn Benson of Victoria, British Columbia, appears to bear similarities to that of Marlise Munoz in Texas -- except for two key differences.
In Munoz's case, her husband wanted her taken off a ventilator and the hospital acknowledged the fetus she carried was not viable.
But Benson's situation is different.
Here, both her husband, Dylan, and the doctors are trying to keep her on a ventilator until they can deliver the baby via a C-section. And the life inside her is growing normally.
"We go see her every day and she is doing so much to grow our son," Dylan Benson told CTV. "Her brain is not alive, but she still is."
The Benson family ordeal began shortly after Christmas.
Robyn Benson complained of a "terrible, terrible headache" and sent her husband out to get some Tylenol. When he returned, she was unresponsive, but still breathing.
At the hospital, doctors discovered she suffered a brain hemorrhage. She was later declared brain dead.
Now, Dylan Benson is in an unimaginable position.
He's counting down the days to the birth of his son -- and the death of his wife.
A much different case
The Munoz family, on the other hand, had nothing to look forward to.
Their case, which played out internationally, sparked a wrenching two-month legal debate about who is alive, who is dead and how the presence of a fetus changes the equation.
Erick Munoz found his wife unconscious at their home on November 26. A blood clot in her lungs had killed her. She hadn't been breathing for about an hour. At the time, she was 14 weeks pregnant with the couple's second child.
But, unlike the Bensons, the fetus Marlise Munoz was carrying was described by family attorneys as "distinctly abnormal," with multiple deformities including a possible heart problem.
Munoz fought a Texas law that says "you cannot withhold or withdraw life-sustaining treatment for a pregnant patient," eventually winning a lawsuit and the right to remove Marlise from life support in late January.
He said he knew his wife wouldn't want to be kept alive artificially.
A community rallies
Five weeks have passed since Dylan Benson found his wife unconscious. The odds are getting better for the boy he's named Iver.
"The doctors have said that he now has higher than an 80% of survival and that increases with every day that passes," Benson said.
Doctors hope Robyn Benson can carry the boy seven more weeks when she will be about 34 weeks pregnant. The baby will then be healthy enough to be delivered.
The community has rallied to support the Bensons in a online fundraising campaign that began over the weekend.
The Baby Iver Fund began with a goal of $36,000. By early Tuesday, it had already doubled that with 88 days left in the campaign.
And the number keeps climbing: It exceeded $92,000 as of noon (3 p.m. ET), about $17,000 above what it was earlier in the day.
"Please help to raise funds for my unborn son, Iver, and I," reads the front page of the online effort. "He has already lost his mother, but I want to provide the best life I possibly can for him."
The money will be used to pay for bills, baby supplies, daycare, housing, food, transportation and an education fund for Iver. Dylan also noted that he hasn't worked during this ordeal, and that compensation during his leave after Iver is born will cover just more than half his normal salary.
People shared the link to the fundraising page around social media, from former co-workers to the local Anglican diocese to strangers in Canada and beyond.
"Humanity fills me with such hope when it comes together like this," tweeted one woman. "Support Dylan and #BabyIver."
Among those chiming in on Twitter was Dylan Benson, who thanked several people -- including one who pointed to a news story from France -- who'd brought attention to his campaign.
He spoke more extensively in a blog post about his unborn baby and wife.
"She was my rock," Dylan wrote of Robyn.
"It is very difficult to know that our son will grow up never meeting his wonderful mother, and that we will have to say our goodbyes to Robyn within hours of seeing Iver for the first time."
(CNN) -- A ventilator kept Robyn Benson breathing for weeks so the baby growing inside her could survive.
Pregnant woman kept on life support
Brain-dead Canadian woman dies after son's birth
http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/world/2014/02/12/dnt-brain-dead-woman-dies-after-giving-birth.cbc-news.html
updated 7:32 AM EST, Wed February 12, 2014
Doctors delivered the brain-dead Canadian woman's son on Saturday. She died the next day.
"On Sunday, we had to unfortunately say goodbye to the strongest and most wonderful woman I have ever met," her husband, Dylan Benson, wrote on his website.
Pregnant woman kept on life support
Their newborn son, Iver, is in a neonatal intensive care unit in Victoria, British Columbia, a hospital spokeswoman said. He could be hospitalized for eight more weeks, Dylan Benson told CNN on Tuesday.
"He's doing well, still learning to breathe and all those things. ... But he's the cutest little man," he said.
The Benson family's ordeal began shortly after Christmas.
Robyn Benson complained of a "terrible, terrible headache" and sent her husband out to get some Tylenol. When he returned, she was unresponsive, but still breathing.
At the hospital, doctors discovered she suffered a brain hemorrhage. She was later declared brain-dead.
The situation left Dylan Benson in an unimaginable position, counting down the days until the birth of his son -- and the death of his wife.
The case drew some comparisons to the case of Marlise Muñoz in Texas, another pregnant woman who was declared brain-dead and hooked up to machines that kept her heart and lungs working. But there were two key differences.
In Muñoz's case, her husband wanted her taken off a ventilator, and the hospital acknowledged the fetus she carried was not viable. A court ultimately ordered the hospital to disconnect the ventilator.
In Benson's situation, family members and doctors agreed to keep her on a ventilator until they could deliver the baby via a cesarean section. And the life inside her was growing normally.
On Tuesday, Dylan Benson told CNN he was grateful for the support he'd received as word spread about his family's story.
"I feel very, very, incredibly thankful. The message of positivity has been incredible, and it's made it easier to get through these past few weeks," he said.
An online fund-raising campaign to support the Bensons began this month.
The Baby Iver Fund started with a goal of $36,000. By Tuesday afternoon, it had already raised more than $150,000.
The money is slated to be used to pay for bills, baby supplies, day care, housing, food, transportation and an education fund for Iver.
"I hope that it makes it so he can have the life he deserves," Dylan Benson said. "I want to thank everyone around the world."
If Robyn Benson were still alive, he said, there's no doubt about what she'd think.
"She would be very proud of our son," he said. "I think she would be happy that there were so many people all over the world that want to see him healthy and happy. "
CNN's Ed Payne, Stephanie Gallman and Catherine E. Shoichet contributed to this report.
Choosing Death, Choosing Life: did being distinctly abnormal make a difference?- part 1
Husband of pregnant woman wants her off life support
By Elizabeth Landau, CNN
updated 4:11 PM EST, Tue December 24, 2013
(CNN) -- Erick Munoz wants to see his wife's wish fulfilled this holiday season, but it's one that carries ethical and legal challenges: To be taken off of life support.
By Elizabeth Landau, CNN
updated 4:11 PM EST, Tue December 24, 2013
(CNN) -- Erick Munoz wants to see his wife's wish fulfilled this holiday season, but it's one that carries ethical and legal challenges: To be taken off of life support.
Marlise Munoz, 33, is in serious condition in the intensive care unit at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas, hospital officials said. She is unconscious and on a ventilator, her husband told CNN affiliate WFAA, but she wouldn't have wanted her life sustained by a machine.
"We talked about it. We're both paramedics," he told WFAA. "We've seen things out in the field. We both knew that we both didn't want to be on life support."
Complicating an already difficult situation is that Munoz is also pregnant, about 18 weeks along, WFAA reported. Texas state law prohibits withdrawing or withholding life-sustaining treatment from a pregnant patient, regardless of her wishes.
Man wants pregnant wife off life support
Brain-dead Texas woman taken off ventilator
http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2014/01/27/newday-valencia-tx-mom-off-of-life-support.cnn.html
Man wants pregnant wife off life support 
Patients can indicate their future wishes about medical treatment, in the event that they are unable to communicate them, through forms called advance directives. But in Texas, under the Health and Safety Code, such a form includes the provision "I understand that under Texas law this Directive has no effect if I have been diagnosed as pregnant."
Erick Munoz told WFAA doctors said his wife may have suffered a pulmonary embolism, which happens when blood clots travel to the lungs from elsewhere in the body. They do not know how long the baby went without nutrients and oxygen.
The hospital would not release specific details about Marlise Munoz's condition, but officials said the hospital would follow Texas law regarding care during pregnancy.
"We have a responsibility as a good corporate citizen here in Tarrant County to also provide the highest quality care we can for all of our patients," said J.R. Labbe, vice president of communications and community affairs for JPS Health Network, in a statement.
"But at all times, we will follow the law as it is applicable to health care in the state of Texas. And state law here says you cannot withhold or withdraw life sustaining treatment for a pregnant patient. It's that clear."
The husband and wife, both paramedics in the Tarrant County area, have a 14-month-old son named Mateo.
Erick Munoz and Marlise Munoz's mother did not immediately respond to requests for comment from CNN.
Erick Munoz found his wife unconscious on November 26, around 2 a.m. He performed CPR on her and then called 911, WFAA reported.
Since that day, the pregnant woman has been on life support, her husband said. Tests have shown that the fetus has a normal heart beat, he said. At 24 weeks, doctors may know more about when the fetus can be taken out, Munoz's family told WFAA. Doctors have also discussed the possibility of taking the fetus to full term.
He told WFAA that his wife had said she would not want to be kept alive by machine, and said he has reached "the point where you wish that your wife's body would stop."
Munoz wears his wife's pink and blue bracelets on his wrist, WFAA reported. Her wedding ring is on his pinkie.
When Munoz walks in the door, he said his son Mateo is waiting for his mother to show up.
"You can see it in his eyes," Munoz said.
http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2014/01/27/newday-valencia-tx-mom-off-of-life-support.cnn.html
updated 7:26 AM EST, Mon January 27, 2014
Fort Worth, Texas (CNN) -- A wrenching court fight -- about who is alive, who is dead and how the presence of a fetus changes the equation -- came to an end Sunday when a brain-dead, pregnant Texas woman was taken off a ventilator.
The devices that had kept Marlise Munoz's heart and lungs working for two months were switched off about 11:30 a.m. Sunday, her family's attorneys announced.
"May Marlise Munoz finally rest in peace, and her family find the strength to complete what has been an unbearably long and arduous journey," the lawyers, Heather King and Jessica Janicek, said in a written statement.
Munoz was 14 weeks pregnant with the couple's second child when her husband found her unconscious on their kitchen floor November 26. Though doctors had pronounced her brain dead and her family had said she did not want to have machines keep her body alive, officials at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth had said state law required them to maintain life-sustaining treatment for a pregnant patient.
Sunday's announcement came two days after a judge in Fort Worth ordered the hospital to remove any artificial means of life support from Munoz by 5 p.m. Monday. Earlier Sunday, the hospital said it intended to comply with that order.
"The past eight weeks have been difficult for the Munoz family, the caregivers and the entire Tarrant County community, which found itself involved in a sad situation," a hospital statement said. "JPS Health Network has followed what we believed were the demands of a state statute."
The hospital acknowledged Friday that Munoz, 33, had been brain dead since November 28 and that the fetus she carried was not viable. Her husband, Erick Munoz, had argued that sustaining her body artificially amounted to "the cruel and obscene mutilation of a deceased body" against her wishes and those of her family.
Marlise Munoz didn't leave any written directives regarding end-of-life care, but her husband and other family members said she had told them she didn't want machines to keep her blood pumping.
In an affidavit filed Thursday in court, Erick Munoz said little to him was recognizable about his wife. Her bones crack when her stiff limbs move. Her usual scent has been replaced by the "smell of death." And her once lively eyes have become "soulless."
The hospital's position drew support from demonstrators outside the hospital, some of whom held signs last week that read "God stands for life" and "Praying for Baby Munoz and family." But others countered with placards bearing messages like "Let Marlise rest in peace" and "Respect Marlise's wishes."
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Existence
“There are no words to excuse the killing of
innocents.” Barak Obama to the United
Nations 2012-10
A strange quote to
come from a person who fully supports unlimited abortion. One could argue that he was speaking of the
loss of civilian life in the civil was in Syria. But those words ought to be able to stand
alone. One could argue that the unborn
do not qualify as people and therefore do not belong in the category of
‘innocents”. When one is conceived, one
begins to exist. At that point no one
else has the right to determine whether one is entitled to exist, unless one
empowers another with that right (i.e. living, DNR, etc.). One’s existence begins at conception and at
death, physically ends, but continues on with God. He, as the source of our existence, is the
only One entitled to the power of life or death.
Pro-Life Without God, by Kelsey Hazzard
Pro-Life Without God
May 1, 2013 at 8:30 am
As the president of Secular Pro-Life, I have been asked to present the non-religious case against abortion. But actually, you’ve probably heard it already. Many people who hear the secular arguments against abortion simply fail to recognize them as secular, because they expect pro-life apologetics to have a religious source. Expectations powerfully color the way we see reality. Discard these expectations, however, and you will soon find that most arguments against abortion do not require the existence of a god.
We start from a premise that is shared by many religions and by secular humanism: the lives of human individuals are exceedingly valuable. A religious person might express this concept as the “sanctity” of life, while a secular person might refer to the possession of fundamental human rights. The core value judgment is the same.
We also make a factual assertion that human individuals begin their lives inside the womb, when sperm meets egg. I began my life as a single-celled zygote; so did you. The scientific consensus on this point is overwhelming. Frankly, denying that life begins at conception is on par with denying the theory of natural selection; the evidence is that strong. And what’s more, the leaders of the abortion rights movement know it. While some rank-and-file abortion advocates will insist that the unborn aren’t alive, or are mere “blobs of tissue,” you will not hear such ignorance from the heads of abortion advocacy groups. Nor will you hear it from abortion doctors. Intellectually honest people on both sides agree that abortion kills a living human individual.
The question raised by abortion is whether the living unborn human being is part of the human community, deserving of rights like older humans; or whether living unborn human beings should be treated differently, as objects rather than as persons.
Abortion supporters have suggested various justifications for the latter approach. None are convincing. In every case, a consistent application of the justification would allow the killing of some human beings outside the womb.
Consciousness
The most common justification for abortion is that unborn children are unconscious, at least in the early stages of pregnancy when most abortions are done. Of course, you are unconscious every night when you go to sleep. People who use this argument do not actually believe that the right to life depends on consciousness. Probe more carefully, and they will clarify that they feel the right to life depends on an inherent capacity for consciousness. But don’t unborn children have that capacity? Consider a woman in a coma, who is expected to come out of the coma in a few months. Is the unborn child’s situation appreciably different? In both cases, consciousness is not present in the moment—there is only a potential for consciousness. If that is a good enough justification for killing a child in the womb, and we’re going to be consistent, then the comatose woman is also a non-person who can be killed “on demand and without apology.” That can’t be right.
Bodily autonomy
Another common abortion argument is the appeal to bodily autonomy; we’ve all heard the saying “my body, my choice.” This is sometimes articulated as a belief that in order to have rights, you must not be dependent upon another body for survival. But as with the consciousness argument, a consistent application of this rule would threaten rights of some born persons.
Other times, the bodily autonomy argument is expressed in terms of consent; you cannot use another person’s body without their permission, and if a woman does not want to be pregnant, the fetus does not have that permission. If the only way to stop the fetus’ use of its mother’s body is to kill it, so be it.
That argument misses an important point: except in rape situations, the mother had a role in causing the unborn baby’s dependence in the first place. In that light, it seems unfair to revoke consent—especially when doing so will kill someone!
When pro-lifers make this point, we are usually accused of being anti-sex and using pregnancy as a “punishment.” That’s untrue. It’s like saying that if you oppose drunk driving, you’re anti-beer! Have your fun—just don’t put the lives of others at risk.
Women’s Health
Next, we have the argument that abortion is necessary to promote women’s health. If abortion is not available on request, they say, women would rather risk harm themselves than allow their child to live. In support of this theory, they point to the “bad old days of back-alley abortion,” when tens of thousands of women died annually. This argument is powerful because it appeals to the same value that the pro-life movement does: a desire to save human lives. The problem is that the women’s health argument has no basis in fact.
In the late 1960s, Dr. Bernard Nathanson co-founded the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Law, which now goes by the name NARAL Pro-Choice America. Nathanson was an abortionist. An atheist, he became pro-life when improved ultrasound technology convinced him of the humanity of the unborn child. (He converted to Catholicism in his old age, and died in 2011.) During his years as a pro-life atheist, he shared his insights into the early abortion movement—in particular, the messaging it used to shape the abortion debate. One key tactic was to conjure abortion statistics out of thin air. In Aborting America, Nathanson wrote:
Gender equality
Finally, abortion advocates resort to an argument of brute force. Yes, unborn children are human beings. Yes, abortion kills them. But abortion is necessary for gender equality: the lives of the unborn are “worth sacrificing,” and we must “be prepared to kill” for the cause.
The fact that this horrific view is being entertained at all actually encourages me. I believe that these are the dying gasps of a pro-abortion movement that simply has no good arguments left.
As a woman, I do not want my worth to be based on my power to destroy the life of a defenseless child. And I’m convinced that as long as abortion is accepted, society will never address the true causes of gender inequality.
Conclusion
This article has reviewed just a few of the secular arguments against abortion. In contrast, purely religious arguments are fairly limited in number; you can argue that abortion violates a divine commandment, or displeases God in some way, or interferes with an act of divine creation. In my experience, even devoutly religious pro-lifers view these purely religious arguments as secondary. The secular case for life is the dominant case for life!
Let us again turn to Dr. Nathanson. His testimony makes it clear that abortion was very deliberately framed as a “religious issue” from the beginning, in order to silence important pro-life voices:So why does this violate our expectations? Where does the expectation come from, that a belief in God is necessary to oppose abortion?
In short, the most pro-life and least religious generation is poised to take over the country. The “religious issue” framework will be completely untenable in such a climate.
Secular Pro-Life is leading the way into a new era of pro-life advocacy. If you like what we’re doing, please join us and support the cause of life.
Kelsey Hazzard is the founder and president of Secular Pro-Life. She received her J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law.
As the president of Secular Pro-Life, I have been asked to present the non-religious case against abortion. But actually, you’ve probably heard it already. Many people who hear the secular arguments against abortion simply fail to recognize them as secular, because they expect pro-life apologetics to have a religious source. Expectations powerfully color the way we see reality. Discard these expectations, however, and you will soon find that most arguments against abortion do not require the existence of a god.
We start from a premise that is shared by many religions and by secular humanism: the lives of human individuals are exceedingly valuable. A religious person might express this concept as the “sanctity” of life, while a secular person might refer to the possession of fundamental human rights. The core value judgment is the same.
We also make a factual assertion that human individuals begin their lives inside the womb, when sperm meets egg. I began my life as a single-celled zygote; so did you. The scientific consensus on this point is overwhelming. Frankly, denying that life begins at conception is on par with denying the theory of natural selection; the evidence is that strong. And what’s more, the leaders of the abortion rights movement know it. While some rank-and-file abortion advocates will insist that the unborn aren’t alive, or are mere “blobs of tissue,” you will not hear such ignorance from the heads of abortion advocacy groups. Nor will you hear it from abortion doctors. Intellectually honest people on both sides agree that abortion kills a living human individual.
The question raised by abortion is whether the living unborn human being is part of the human community, deserving of rights like older humans; or whether living unborn human beings should be treated differently, as objects rather than as persons.
Abortion supporters have suggested various justifications for the latter approach. None are convincing. In every case, a consistent application of the justification would allow the killing of some human beings outside the womb.
Consciousness
The most common justification for abortion is that unborn children are unconscious, at least in the early stages of pregnancy when most abortions are done. Of course, you are unconscious every night when you go to sleep. People who use this argument do not actually believe that the right to life depends on consciousness. Probe more carefully, and they will clarify that they feel the right to life depends on an inherent capacity for consciousness. But don’t unborn children have that capacity? Consider a woman in a coma, who is expected to come out of the coma in a few months. Is the unborn child’s situation appreciably different? In both cases, consciousness is not present in the moment—there is only a potential for consciousness. If that is a good enough justification for killing a child in the womb, and we’re going to be consistent, then the comatose woman is also a non-person who can be killed “on demand and without apology.” That can’t be right.
Bodily autonomy
Another common abortion argument is the appeal to bodily autonomy; we’ve all heard the saying “my body, my choice.” This is sometimes articulated as a belief that in order to have rights, you must not be dependent upon another body for survival. But as with the consciousness argument, a consistent application of this rule would threaten rights of some born persons.
Other times, the bodily autonomy argument is expressed in terms of consent; you cannot use another person’s body without their permission, and if a woman does not want to be pregnant, the fetus does not have that permission. If the only way to stop the fetus’ use of its mother’s body is to kill it, so be it.
That argument misses an important point: except in rape situations, the mother had a role in causing the unborn baby’s dependence in the first place. In that light, it seems unfair to revoke consent—especially when doing so will kill someone!
When pro-lifers make this point, we are usually accused of being anti-sex and using pregnancy as a “punishment.” That’s untrue. It’s like saying that if you oppose drunk driving, you’re anti-beer! Have your fun—just don’t put the lives of others at risk.
Women’s Health
Next, we have the argument that abortion is necessary to promote women’s health. If abortion is not available on request, they say, women would rather risk harm themselves than allow their child to live. In support of this theory, they point to the “bad old days of back-alley abortion,” when tens of thousands of women died annually. This argument is powerful because it appeals to the same value that the pro-life movement does: a desire to save human lives. The problem is that the women’s health argument has no basis in fact.
In the late 1960s, Dr. Bernard Nathanson co-founded the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Law, which now goes by the name NARAL Pro-Choice America. Nathanson was an abortionist. An atheist, he became pro-life when improved ultrasound technology convinced him of the humanity of the unborn child. (He converted to Catholicism in his old age, and died in 2011.) During his years as a pro-life atheist, he shared his insights into the early abortion movement—in particular, the messaging it used to shape the abortion debate. One key tactic was to conjure abortion statistics out of thin air. In Aborting America, Nathanson wrote:
It was always “5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year.” I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose the others did too if they stopped to think of it. But in the “morality” of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics?So what are the actual numbers? According to the National Center for Health Statistics, 39 women died from illegal abortions in 1972, the year before Roe v. Wade. Maternal deaths from abortion haven’t been in the thousands since the 1930s, before the advent of antibiotics! For perspective, the CDC reports that 12 women died in legal abortions in 2009; that number is almost certainly low, because many states (notably California) do not report to the CDC.
Gender equality
Finally, abortion advocates resort to an argument of brute force. Yes, unborn children are human beings. Yes, abortion kills them. But abortion is necessary for gender equality: the lives of the unborn are “worth sacrificing,” and we must “be prepared to kill” for the cause.
The fact that this horrific view is being entertained at all actually encourages me. I believe that these are the dying gasps of a pro-abortion movement that simply has no good arguments left.
As a woman, I do not want my worth to be based on my power to destroy the life of a defenseless child. And I’m convinced that as long as abortion is accepted, society will never address the true causes of gender inequality.
Conclusion
This article has reviewed just a few of the secular arguments against abortion. In contrast, purely religious arguments are fairly limited in number; you can argue that abortion violates a divine commandment, or displeases God in some way, or interferes with an act of divine creation. In my experience, even devoutly religious pro-lifers view these purely religious arguments as secondary. The secular case for life is the dominant case for life!
Let us again turn to Dr. Nathanson. His testimony makes it clear that abortion was very deliberately framed as a “religious issue” from the beginning, in order to silence important pro-life voices:So why does this violate our expectations? Where does the expectation come from, that a belief in God is necessary to oppose abortion?
We fed the media such lies as “we all know that opposition to abortion comes from the hierarchy and not from most Catholics” and “Polls prove time and again that most Catholics want abortion law reform.” And the media drum-fired all this into the American people, persuading them that anyone opposing permissive abortion must be under the influence of the Catholic hierarchy and that Catholics in favor of abortion are enlightened and forward-looking. An inference of this tactic was that there were no non-Catholic groups opposing abortion. The fact that other Christian as well as non-Christian religions were (and still are) monolithically opposed to abortion was constantly suppressed, along with pro-life atheists’ opinions.It worked then, but it won’t work for much longer. Pro-abortion leaders are worried that the Millennial generation is rejecting abortion. Polling confirms their fears. And nearly a quarter of Millennials have no religion.
In short, the most pro-life and least religious generation is poised to take over the country. The “religious issue” framework will be completely untenable in such a climate.
Secular Pro-Life is leading the way into a new era of pro-life advocacy. If you like what we’re doing, please join us and support the cause of life.
Kelsey Hazzard is the founder and president of Secular Pro-Life. She received her J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law.
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