This article was written by Fr. Frank Pavone
National Director, Priests for Life
Some years ago, a phone call came into a Milwaukee police department. Children were throwing stones off of a bridge, the officer was told. When police arrived at the scene, they asked the children what they were throwing. The reply came, "Little people."
These children had discovered small grey containers that held the remains of aborted children. The containers had been thrown in the trash of a nearby abortion mill. "Little people" had become playthings, because the law taught the slightly older children well. What is disposable, after all, can also be used for play. Yet the children had not lost their straightforward honesty, and ability to call things by their names. These aborted babies were people.
My friend Monica Migliorino Miller, a professor, author, and pro-life activist, is also straightforward and honest. She writes of one of the times that she and other activists went to retrieve the bodies of some of our aborted brothers and sisters in Chicago. This effort eventually led to a burial service conducted by the Archdiocese of Chicago. Monica writes,
"When we pulled our cars slowly into the dark alley behind the Michigan Avenue Medical Center, rats scurried before our headlights, frightened by the noise of our intrusion. Our three-vehicle caravan parked in the alley off Monroe Street in downtown Chicago. We stopped in front of a loading dock upon which stood three garbage dumpsters and a filthy blue-colored trash barrel. ...We climbed onto the loading dock, opened the dumpsters, and began to search through the trash. I opened a red dumpster ... At the very bottom was a small, heavy cardboard box. It was about the size of two shoe boxes and was sealed in silver duct tape. I carefully cradled the box in my arms and placed it in the back seat of one of the cars. ...
"We drove to Joe Scheidler's garage to examine the contents of the box, first setting it on a table beneath a bright light. We all gathered around the table as Peter carefully peeled off the silver duct tape and opened the flaps of the box. Inside were small plastic "specimen" bags. Each bag contained the remains of an aborted baby with placenta and uterine tissue. We took the bags out and laid them on the table. There were forty-three of them in all which represented about three or four days worth of abortions at the Michigan Avenue Medical Center.
"Several bags were marked with the name of the aborted baby's mother, her age, the gestational age of the fetal child, the date of the abortion and a number. ...Despite the small size of the fetal remains, their tiny arms, legs, hands, feet, rib cages, spinal columns, eyes (floating free out of their sockets), bits of skull tissue and sometimes even an intact face were plainly visible through the plastic windows of the specimen bags."
Sometimes it takes dumpsters, bridges, and children to wake us up to the reality of what the "choice" of "abortion" really is.
Note: The photos of many of the children taken from the Chicago dumpster can be seen at
www.priestsforlife.org/images.
This column can be found online at
www.priestsforlife.org/columns/columns2007/07-09-10dumpstersbridgeschildren.htm.
Fr. Frank's columns can be heard via podcast. See
www.priestsforlife.org/podcast for more details.
Fr. Frank's columns can be listened to in MP3 format at
www.priestsforlife.org/columns/columns2007/index.htm.
