Dumpsters, Bridges, and
Children
Fr. Frank Pavone
National Director, Priests for Life
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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.
2007 Columns
