Chapter Fifteen

Haven Cemetery and the Last Work of Mercy

 

"Fowl deeds shall rise."

(Hamlet)

On February 18, 1988, I got into my Celica and drove to the far northwest side of Milwaukee. I was searching for a specific address on an isolated country road. To the right the road was lined with trees, and on the left was a large field. The scene was pleasant and serene. snow. The field, covered with fresh, virginal snow, glistened brightly in the sun; and the trees against the winter sky were soft and feathered in their bareness.

I was looking for something called the HGS Corporation, whose address was supposed to be somewhere on this country road. Even driving slowly I soon came to the end of it, where it made a bend to go back out to the main highway. Frustrated by my search, I turned my car around to go back down the road again. I was beginning to think there was no such thing as an HGS Corporation. Nothing met my eyes that looked the least bit commercial or industrial, and no address number was visible on the scanty buildings alongside this country path.

But then--in a clearing of white snow dotted with evergreens and shrubs--there was a smokestack, its peak black with soot. It was the smokestack of a crematorium. No doubt existed in my mind now. I had found what I was looking for. Soon I would make another discovery. I drove my car past the property to carefully observe the site. I noticed a sign near a driveway. It said "Pet Haven Cemetery and Crematorium." Another very faded sign, hidden by the branches of a tree, read "HGS Corporation."

I turned my car into the driveway, eager to get a better look at the property and hoped, whomever the proprietors were, they would afford me the opportunity. Just as I parked my car, a plump and attractive, red-haired, middle-aged woman came out of an office attached to the front end of a house. She greeted me in a friendly manner.

"Can I help you?" she asked.

"Well," I said, "This is a pet cemetery, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is," she replied.

"Do you mind if I visit?"

"Not at all," she said enthusiastically and then pointed to the back end of the property. "The cemetery's up the hill there, beyond that pile of wood."

I trudged through the snow up the small hill and came to rows of gravestones protruding through the deep snow. Several of the tombstones were quite large and some of them had a photo attached of the beloved pet buried beneath. One tombstone read "Laddie we miss you." An ornate pink granite tombstone with the photo of a large white rabbit, read: "Puff Puff, he gave us his heart and asked for nothing." Another tombstone for a dog was inscribed "Rover, we've committed you into the loving arms of Jesus."

I walked along the rows of pet graves, circling around to get a closer look at the crematorium itself. It was housed in a garage-type building, the roof customized to accommodate the jutting smokestack. I peered into the window of the building. The crematorium was a huge machine studded with large dials, levers, and temperature gauges. The sight of the machine filled me with dread.

I turned to walk back to my car and again was greeted by the woman from the office. I decided it might be a good idea to have some written information about Pet Haven, so I asked the woman if she had a business card and pamphlets available. "Sure. Come into the office," she said cheerfully. I followed my friendly hostess into a small room. She told me her name was Jacquelyn Shane and that she, with her husband Henry, owned and operated the Pet Haven Cemetery. The room was filled with funeral items specially designed for animals. Small caskets for cats and dogs were on display. Funeral urns made of stained glass, wherein one could keep the ashes of a dead pet, were arranged on one table. More traditional brass urns were also for sale, along with wreaths and artificial flowers that mourners could place at the gravesite of their beloved Fido or Felix. A painting of St. Francis of Assisi hung on one wall.

Jacquelyn gave me a little tour of the office, showing me the urns and the caskets. She showed me a small box which contained in a sealed plastic bag the ashes of an incinerated cat ready to be picked up by its owner. She explained to me that many customers held funeral services for their dead pets. She opened a photo album and showed me pictures of animal wakes. I peered at photos of dogs laid out in white caskets with flowers and candles all around. One picture was of a dead Irish Setter.

"I see you have an incinerator. Do you use that for the animals?" I asked her.

"Oh yes, but it's not an incinerator," she was quick to correct me in her pleasant manner. "It's a crematorium, and it's a human crematorium," she added in a tone of voice which expressed how proud she was of the machine.

"Human crematorium?"

"Yes," she responded, "It's designed for humans, but we use it for animals."

I was very anxious to pursue this conversation to see if Jacquelyn would offer any other information about what the crematorium was used for.

"Well, how about other types of tissue? Like, for example, amputated limbs. Do you burn that kind of stuff?" I asked in a naive tone of voice.

"Oh no," said Jacquelyn, "Only animals. We don't burn anything human. You need a special license for that."

Jacquelyn gave me reprints of news articles published in local papers about Pet Haven and a business card. The motto on the card read: "All pets buried with complete dignity."

After the twenty-seven babies aborted at Bread and Roses were found in a trash dumpster by children, a Milwaukee alderman, Howard Tietz, pushed through an ordinance which stipulated that hospitals and clinics could not simply "dispose" of either miscarried or aborted babies by placing them in trash containers. Medical facilities had to file an end-of-the-year report with the Milwaukee Health Department that documented their manner of disposition. The HGS Corporation was cited in these records as a location where the bodies of aborted babies from three Milwaukee abortion centers were being burned. Bread and Roses, where in 1988 abortions were performed through the fifth month of pregnancy, had the fetal remains shipped to Pet Haven. The Imperial Health Center first sent the fetal bodies to Physicians Clinical Laboratory, a Milwaukee pathology lab, and from there the bodies were shipped to Pet Haven. Affiliated Medical Services, another local abortion center, had the aborted babies picked up directly by the Shanes. The letters "HGS" were simply the Initials of Henry George Shane. Health Department administrators did not know that the HGS Corporation was a cemetery and crematorium for animals.

The Shanes took extreme pride in their business. They believed their pet cemetery rescued dead pets from inhumane rendering plants where their fats were extracted for commercial purposes. Their business sprang from a moral conviction that animals, especially pets, deserved to be buried with honor and dignity because of the service and loyalty these animals displayed to their masters. The Shanes' business had been featured in a February 1985 Milwaukee Magazine article.

"You’d be surprised how many people want their dog or cat buried with them," [said Henry] approaching his workshed. "And it’s legal in Wisconsin to put an animal in a human cemetery, so this’ll be a service we can offer next year."

One such pair presently occupies a plot on the grounds, he mentions. And soon their undoubtedly will be several more. "Like I said, people really get close to their pets."

Shane opens the shed’s garage door and reveals an imposing two year old state-of-the-art electronic crematory. It's a Crawford," he says proudly. "The Cadillac of crematories...."

Shane fires up the Crawford for demonstration purposes. The lower after burners kick in first and the temperature is displayed digitally on the LED read-out. After about three minutes two gas pilots shoot torrid flames into the vacant chamber from above.

"We do mostly dogs," he says, watching the fire through an observation hatch. "We do a lot of cats and birds and occasionally something more unusual...."

The afternoon sun casts long shadows on Pet Haven. Burials are suspended during winter months...but the animals can be stored until spring in his eight-by-ten walk-in freezer. And while the cold weather precludes interments, he notes, it rarely affects the number of loved ones who visit to pay respects to the dearly departed....

"Like I said twenty years ago," he adds confidently, "people bury people because they have to. But people bury pets because they want to."

The Christian religion teaches that there are seven corporal works of mercy. The last work of mercy is to bury the dead. Perhaps the Shanes believed they were somehow doing right by burning the bodies of aborted babies with dead cats and dogs, but in essence it was merely just another means of disposal that contributed to the denigration of the unborn. To cremate or bury the human body and to surround these acts with rituals that invoke the supernatural is perhaps the most universal of all human traits, found even in the most primitive cultures. To refuse a human being funeral rites and burial is an abomination and was so even to ancient pre-Christian peoples. Something sacred was stolen from the gods when the living refused to bury the dead. Sophocles's great heroine, Antigone, knew this well and gave her life to bury her brother, Polyneices, whose corpse was deliberately left to rot on a battlefield. Creon, lord of Thebes, had forbidden anyone to bury him in order to punish him for rising up in battle against his brother. But Antigone violated the law of man to fulfill the moral law of God. She would not permit the corpse of a man to be eaten by birds and beasts and left to decay without funeral rites. Antigone's decision to bury her brother contrary to civil law was an act of justice. In response to her sister, who was afraid to go against the law, Antigone said: "I will do my part--and thine, if thou wilt not--to a brother. False to him I will never be found."

The last corporal work of mercy, to bury the dead, is a declaration that the human body matters to God. We give to the body the respect due the person. Part of the measure of Christian civilization--or any civilization--is how its people treat the human body, because it is a constitutive part of the person made in the image and likeness of God.

I had already taken aborted babies out of the trash. I never thought I would do such a thing again. Yet this cold February found Edmund and me, with other pro-lifers from Milwaukee and Chicago, once again retrieving broken fetal bodies out of the refuse. Earlier that month Joe Scheidler and Andy Scholberg had come to Milwaukee. Joe had given a speech at Marquette University. Afterward he, Andy and I went to an I-HOP down the street for coffee. Andy leaned over to me and said: "Monica, we've found the motherload." I looked at him quizzically. He explained that an anonymous employee of the Vital med pathology lab in Northbrook, Illinois, had telephoned Conrad Wojnar, who was the director of three crisis pregnancy centers in the Chicago area. The employee told Conrad that the bodies of aborted babies were being left out on a loading dock for garbage disposal and asked him if he could please do something. Upset about the bodies being thrown out in the trash, the employee gave Conrad instructions on how to find them.

On the evening of February 20, 1988, in the same week I visited Pet Haven, I drove several miles to Wilmette, Illinois, to meet Tim Murphy and a few other Chicago pro-lifers. All of us then drove several miles to a large industrial park in Northbrook. Covered by the darkness of night, our cars wound their way down the deserted streets, which curved in a labyrinthine pattern between the buildings and the parking lots. Finally we came to our destination: a large garage connected to the building that housed the pathology lab.

We parked our cars in the parking lot of a building across the street. The laboratory building was wedged between two veins of the Illinois expressway, one that turned to the east to connect motorists with the Edens and the other, that continued due south which was 294. When I got out of the car my lungs breathed in the cold night air. I looked into the sky and saw to the north a large ring of bright, white lights against the darkness. The ring of lights looked like a spaceship hovering above the earth. I did not understand what the lights were, but they made the scene surreal. Further west, across the expressway, was a tower built with green-colored glass blocks with illuminated red letters that said: "Lake Arbor Centre."

Our small group walked to the entrance of the garage. A side door had been left open, and so we entered. We immediately stood on a long concrete ramp that led down to the loading dock. On the dock were three green-colored garbage dumpsters. Dozens of heavy-duty cardboard barrels were stacked along the back wall. Dozens and dozens of cardboard boxes were strewn about the dock in a haphazard fashion. A numb feeling came over me. As I examined the boxes more closely, I saw that they were all filled with the remains of aborted babies. Before my eyes were literally hundreds of them packed in the familiar whirl pacs and specimen jars. The cardboard barrels also contained some fetal remains mixed in with waste and debris.

It struck me that all of these fetal children had been alive only a few short days ago. Now they lay dead and abandoned--cut from their mother's wombs, cut from the human race--the corpses of the fetal bodies stacked on a loading dock inside an industrial park, the boxes which held them marked "for disposal." The fetal children were castaways, far from mother, far from father, far from home.

As I stood on the edge of the loading dock it seemed my journey and theirs had brought us together at the edge of the world--where the aborted babies had been cast adrift in a desolate sea outside all human care. A dark sad, heavy revelation suddenly took life deep inside me. The image of those tiny human lives scattered about on the loading dock made me realize that the true plight of the aborted unborn was not just that they had been killed, but that their deaths made them horribly, frighteningly alone.

We had to go to the edge of the world to bring them back--to give to what remained of them their first and final human embrace. The aborted babies had been piled on the loading dock to await their final journey to an industrial incinerator. (They were to be picked up by a company called Precision Energy Systems.) The bodies had been shipped by parcel post to the pathology lab from nine different abortion centers. The boxes that contained the fetal remains had return addresses on them. Most of the clinics that sent the remains to Vital Med were the WHO clinics, short for the National Women's Health Organization clinics, the string of abortion centers managed by Susan Hill. Apparently the clinics had a group contract with Vital Med. We found fetal remains from two Milwaukee abortion centers: Summit (one of the WHO clinics) and Metropolitan Medical Services. Besides Milwaukee, aborted babies had been shipped from clinics in Fargo, North Dakota; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Raleigh, North Carolina; Wilmington, Delaware; Fairfield, New Jersey; Chicago and Harvey, Illinois.

Each "whirl pac" or specimen jar had a number written on it. Also scribbled on the fetal containers were the words "uterine contents," "uterine tissue," or "POC," meaning "products of conception." Ironically almost every container bore the name of the aborted baby's mother. It seemed strange that the mothers who had aborted their children in life were still bound to them in death. I felt we had stumbled upon a terrible secret. The ugly aftermath of abortion the clinics carefully tried to conceal was laid before us in this treasure house of death. We literally could stick our hands inside and come out with fistfulls of broken bodies. At the edge of the world, in this desolate extremity, abortion represented human beings according to the structure of its ethic. These were not humans in a personal relation to others, to their mothers and fathers who gave them life and then gave them death. These fetal humans were reduced to a simple mass of impersonal matter with their human individuality crushed out of them.

On March 8, 1988, I went back to Pet Haven with Sandy Schultz, who was now very active with the local chapter of the Christian Action Council. Sandy was very visibly seven months pregnant. Together we hoped to persuade the Shanes by moral argumentation to stop burning the remains of the aborted fetal children with the remains of dead animals. Our main goal was to help them see that they were a part of the abortion business. When we drove onto the property, Henry and Jacquelyn were standing outside the office. When Jacquelyn saw us get out of the car, she looked apprehensive. The four of us entered the office. The Shanes looked at us with a nervous fear, though Sandy and I had not yet stated our reason for coming. Henry was a tall and lean, intelligent-looking man in his late forties with dark hair, a dark beard and glasses. I quickly got to the matter at hand.

"Mr. and Mrs. Shane, we know that you are burning the bodies of aborted babies with animals in your crematorium, and we would like to ask you to stop doing that."

Henry's eyes became instantly wide, aflame with indignation. "What do you mean coming here and questioning what we do?" he said.

"Well, for one thing, what you're doing is illegal, isn't it?" I responded. I was very interested in his answer.

"Illegal? How do you know if it is?" asked Jacquelyn.

"Because you don't have a special license to do it."

"Why don't you check to see if we've got one before making your accusation? If you do something to bring scandal to my business--all I can say is you'd better have a damn good attorney!" Henry shouted with an air of bavado.

"Do you have a license?" I asked calmly.

"You can check it out for yourself," said Jacquelyn.

"Why don't you just tell us," said Sandy.

"Go look for yourself," she replied again.

"We don't have to listen to these people, honey," said Henry.

"Look," said Jacquelyn as she leaned forward on her chair, "We're running an honest business here. Abortion is legal. We're not doing anything wrong."

I did not want to focus the conversation on what was legal, but rather on what was moral; so I switched to the topic of abortion itself.

"I'm not for abortion, and I'm not against it," Jacquelyn explained, "I do think, however, that under certain circumstances abortion is justified, like when the fetus is deformed."

Sandy and I struggled with the Shanes for an hour and a half. We tried to show them that burning the bodies of aborted babies with dead animals was a violation of the babies' dignity. I said these were human beings and they deserved respect and honor appropriate to them as fellow members of the human race. To burn these fetal babies with dead dogs, cats, hamsters, snakes and parrots was simply a part of what abortion was all about. The fetal babies were treated like garbage while they lived, and the Shanes were continuing the assault upon their dignity now that they were dead.

"What we're doing," said Henry, "is the right and proper way to dispose of these fetuses. If abortion is legal they have to be disposed of, don't they? Isn't it better that we burn them here than have them wind up in a trash dumpster somewhere? You people shouldn't criticize us. You should thank us!"

I pointed out to Henry that his distinction between burning babies in his crematorium and throwing them in the trash was purely academic. Both practices amounted to a degradation. Human beings are being treated like something they are not. I asked Henry several times what he did with the ashes of the aborted babies but he refused to answer my question. I concluded that he and Jacquelyn were simply putting the ashes of the aborted babies in the garbage along with the ashes of the dead pets whose owners did not claim them. Or perhaps the ashes of the aborted babies and the ashes of the pets were buried together in a common grave.

"We are living in the middle of a national holocaust," Sandy tried to explain. "What we are going through now is similar to Nazi Germany--and you have made yourselves a part of it." Henry waved his arms in protest. "No, no, no! You can't compare abortion to that. Hitler was only one man and he forced those killings on the people. Here the majority is behind abortion."

"Well then," said Sandy, "if that's the case, what the abortionists are doing and what you are doing is worse. You are committing atrocities against human life freely with no one forcing you."

"Can't you see," I stated slowly and deliberately, "to burn human beings with animals in your crematorium is an attack upon the dignity and sacredness of human life. It is wrong. It is immoral. Besides you take money directly from at least one abortion mill. This is blood money, money made by killing the unborn. The money that you take as a fee to burn the babies is the same money the abortionist is paid to kill them."

"You're darn right," said Henry his eyes growing wide with indignation again. "I don't provide this service for free."

Henry sincerely believed it was right and proper to burn aborted babies with dead animals. In the course of our conversation he stated he favored active euthanasia for the elderly, and if it was legal, he would burn their bodies in his crematorium as well.

Throughout the dialog, Henry and Jacquelyn constantly felt it necessary to defend their pet cemetery as if Sandy and I disapproved of their care and concern for animals. We never attacked the cemetery as such, yet the Shanes tried to impress on us how pets who had been loyal and obedient companions deserved dignity and respect. Henry then got up and went over to a large cage and took out a wild morning dove--a common, attractive, gray bird, the kind I often saw cooing in my own backyard. Henry brought the bird over for Sandy and me to see. He stroked it lovingly.

"Look at this wonderful bird. Isn't it tragic that they are left out in the cold in the winter with hardly a thing to eat?" Henry said.

Even though I have a love for animals, at that moment I was not much interested in the bird. To get the discussion back on track I pointed out that the pets buried in their cemetery were given more honor than the bodies of aborted babies. Dick tried to eliminate my concern by saying that the aborted babies were buried separately from the pets. I did not believe him and would find out later that his statement was not exactly true.

"What is the value of a human being?" I asked.

"Some animals are better than people," said Henry. "A faithful dog is better than all those drug addicts, muggers, rapists, and murderers."

The Shanes had begun to articulate their philosophy. For them, human beings possessed no ontological dignity. Human beings were not to be valued because they had innate dignity such as being created in the image and likeness of God as the Judeo/Christian tradition teaches. A human being's value was determined by whether or not he was a nice person or a productive person. Therefore, nice dogs were more valuable than despicable people. Human beings had no more intrinsic worth than anything else on the planet. Thus it was not wrong to burn the aborted babies with cats and dogs who were good to their masters because these "fetuses" had no more worth than these animals. In fact, they were worth less since in their short lives they were unable to display the loyalty of a dog.

I turned to Jacquelyn and asked her: "Jacquelyn, don't you think these aborted children have any value before almighty God, a value more than that of an animal?"

"Well, I believe in God. I'm a Catholic," she replied.

"How can you say you're a Catholic? What does it mean for you to be Catholic?"

"It means I belong to a particular religious denomination, but it's not any better or worse than any other," she replied.

Jacquelyn's view of her religion was the same as her attitude toward people. Nothing--not even her faith--had any more intrinsic goodness than anything else.

Sandy and I got up to leave. We saw the Shanes could not be convinced. Jacquelyn opened the door of the office for us.

"Well, perhaps you'll hear from us again," I said as we left.

"Oh yes, I'm sure we will," Jacquelyn said.

Ten days after our visit to Pet Haven, Sandy and I were guests on WVCY's "In Focus," a popular local Christian television program. We announced to thousands of viewers our discovery that a pet cemetery in Milwaukee burned aborted babies with the remains of dead animals. As part of the program I asked the host, Vic Eliason, if I could show photos of aborted babies retrieved from the trash dumpster in Chicago last year. Vic agreed to show the photos on the air. But then something occurred to me. We had been gathering the bodies of aborted babies from Vital Med for the last three weeks. It was important to us that these bodies be treated with the greatest care and reverence. Edmund and I stored several boxes of the fetal remains, I in a spare room in my apartment, he in the basement of the house where he had an apartment right across the street from mine. As more bodies were collected, we found other homes for them both in Milwaukee and the Chicago area. We intended to bury the bodies as we had done with the others, but it appeared that the retrieval effort would continue for several weeks.

Instead of showing photos of the aborted babies Vic Eliason agreed to permit us to show the actual bodies on the "In Focus" program. With the magnifying power of the TV camera the broken bodies, legs, arms, hands, feet, became bigger than life. The creases in an aborted baby's hand, no larger than the nail on my little finger, were plainly and beautifully visible. Two of the aborted babies shown on the program were four months gestational age. One baby's rib cage was virtually intact. It still held the fetal heart. I was struck by it. The heart's size and shape reminded me of of the Sacred Heart of Jesus one sees on Catholic devotional badges.

In the room where I kept the aborted babies, I began to notice a bad odor but was unable to account for its source. The abortion clinics packed the remains in diluted formalin solution, a powerful preservative which gave off a distinct chemical smell. This new odor, however, was a stench. When I arrived at the WVCY television studio, I finally discovered the cause. One bag contained the body of a fetal child in the process of decay because the abortion center where he came from had not provided any formalin solution. When I opened the bag to prepare this body for the program, the smell of death overwhelmed me. The aborted baby was about eleven weeks old. I could see the lower-half of the small, severed body--his hips, legs and feet. They were not stiff and intact like the other fetal babies as the formalin solution froze into the limbs the moment of their killing.

When I looked at the limp, decaying body I was taken in by the reality of death. I thought, "The child's life was denied to him, but now before my eyes death's decay is dissolving the last vestiges of his existence." The child was being wiped off the face of the earth as if he had never lived.

Viewers of the "In Focus" program were shocked when they heard about Pet Haven. The humanity of the abortion victims was placed right before them. People were able to see that the bodies of human beings were burned with dead cats and dogs. The response was immediate. One viewer wasted no time calling the secular press. The following morning I had interviews with two radio stations, the Milwaukee Journal, and the ABC-TV affiliate, Channel 12 News. A reporter from the TV station discovered that the Shanes' use of the crematorium for the burning of human remains was indeed illegal. Henry and Jacquelyn had violated a zoning variance which allowed them to burn only animal carcasses but no other type of "waste material." The illegality of the Shanes' practice piqued media interest. For several days in a row, as the story developed, the black, sooty smokestack at Pet Haven was a familiar sight on the evening news.

The massive news coverage helped to galvanize pro-lifers into action. The week following the "In Focus" program, hundreds of phone calls poured into the WVCY studio. People wanted to know what they could do to stop the aborted babies from being burned at Pet Haven or how they could become active in the pro-life movement itself. City Hall and the Department of Building Inspection received their share of phone calls from irate citizens as well, hundreds of them. For three days in a row, my own phone rang every ten minutes. People asked me what they could do to stop abortion. Many people said that they had been active years ago, but had dropped out. Now they wished to become active again.

I pondered why news of aborted babies burned with dead animals would ignite such overwhelming outrage. Abortion itself had not changed. What changed, however, was how the public viewed abortion. The incineration of the bodies of fetal children with animals finally gave the public something tangible to measure the worth of the babies against. Thousand of people were jarred into the realization that something indecent, perhaps even abominable, was taking place that began in the abortion chamber and ended in the rising smoke of the Pet Haven crematorium. On a country road amid the trees and meadows, some awful and long-hidden secret about our society, was now revealed.

At first, poor Henry and Jacquelyn refused to speak to the media. But after three days of news coverage, they decided to change their strategy and began to grant interviews to defend their practice. Pathetically, however, the more the Shanes tried to justify themselves, the more their own words served to indict them. On March 23rd a Milwaukee Journal article appeared with the headline: "Crematory owners defend fetal disposal." In the article Henry stated: "The public is fine as long as they don't know what's going on." Jacquelyn explained that the public should not be so outraged since "the firm accepted fetuses only from a few sources and it can't be two percent of our business." Henry went on to say that the pet cemetery charged for the burning of the aborted babies "a flat rate for so many pounds." Undoubtedly Henry wished to convey how little money they made burning the fetal remains, however, his statement underscored the fact that, to them, the aborted unborn were merely flesh burnt by the pound.

In the week following the WVCY program, inspectors from the Department of Building Inspection paid a visit to Pet Haven. Henry cooperated with them in every way and explained in detail how the babies were burnt. This information was passed on to Alderman Howard Tietz. On a local late-night talk show Tietz, who shared the program with the Shanes, described to the public how the fetal corpses were burnt. Since the bodies were wet with blood and formalin the usual heat level in the crematorium needed to be raised to achieve the incineration. To aid the burning process, dry and brittle animal carcasses were placed in the bottom of the crematorium to serve as kindling. The boxes of aborted babies were placed on a shelf above the dead animals. Only in this sense were the aborted babies "burned separately." I later spoke to Alderman Tietz in person, and he explained to me that when the temperature rose to a certain degree the specimen bags burnt and melted causing the blood of the aborted to drip down onto the animals below. In this there was a certain reduction of one into the other. The crematorium rendered all ashes the same.

On March 26th the Milwaukee Journal editorial cartoon was very critical of the pet cemetery. It depicted a house in the distance that looked haunted, with bare trees hovering over it. Behind the house was a tall smokestack belching out thick black smoke. In the foreground of the picture was a large sign which read "Doggy Heaven Pet Cemetery, 'We treat animals with dignity.' Below that slogan was written "Fetuses also cremated."

The next day, three hundred pro-lifers demonstrated in front of Pet Haven Cemetery and Crematory. Local media covered the event. Henry and Jacquelyn closed their business for the day. They had been issued a "cease and desist" order from the Department of Building Inspection. During this time they were forbidden to burn the aborted babies pending a public hearing. One lone old woman came out in the cold to counter-protest on behalf of the cemetery. She had two pets buried there. For two and a half hours this thin, old woman dressed in a gray coat stood sternly, speechless and motionless, like a statue at the edge of the Pet Haven property. She held a sign, a message meant for the pro-lifers, which stated: "Your presence is degrading to all those resting here." Some letters appeared in the local press defending the Shanes. One letter printed in the April 7th Milwaukee Sentinel read:

Monica Migliorino (director of Citizens for Life) and Alderman Howard Tietz have insulted every pet owner and every lovable and dedicated pet in the world....

Pets and pet owners have love and dedication in abundance, something Migliorino and Tietz apparently never heard of....

I would consider it an honor to be cremated with pets, rather than resting near some atrocious corpses such as Tietz and Migliorino.

On the day of the Pet Haven picket, the Milwaukee Journal printed an editorial which criticized the burning of fetuses with animals. The paper seemed concerned about the public relations fallout for the abortion clinics.

If abortion clinics here had been looking for a way to generate even harsher criticism of their work, they could hardly have picked a more effective strategy than contracting with a pet cemetery for cremation of fetuses. Even proponents of the right to abortion must be troubled by the message that the practice of joint fetal/animal cremation sends.

By expanding their business to include cremation of fetuses provided by abortion clinics, owners of Pet Haven Cemetery and Crematory apparently violated city zoning codes. Now Pet Haven says it will end the practice.

The abortion clinics, for their part, ought to negotiate contracts for fetus cremation with funeral homes or conventional cemeteries. The cost might rise, but the public's sense of outrage might diminish somewhat.

The editorial reads like a satire. It seems to say the real problem is not abortion, but only that abortionists deny the fetuses a decent burial. The burning of aborted babies with animals is condemned only because the practice subjects the abortion business to public criticism. Indirectly, the media admitted, in this instance, that the unborn are human. After all, what sense does it make to send mere uterine tissue or blobs of cells to a funeral home? The editors, however, failed to confront the real issue at hand. The burning of the aborted babies with animals is an intrinsic part of the abortion ethic. The denigration of the bodies of the aborted unborn flows from abortion's attack on the sacredness of these human lives. The one cannot be disentangled from the other.

On June 23rd, four months after we first learned about Pet Haven, the City of Milwaukee Zoning Board convened a hearing to determine whether to alter the Shanes' special-use permit. Over thirty pro-lifers were present to oppose any change. The Shanes undoubtedly felt overwhelmed and alone. No one came to speak on their behalf except their attorney. He argued that no special variance was needed since, as reported in the June 24 Milwaukee Journal, "human fetuses and animal carcasses were both tissue," and steps were taken "to separate the burning processes for animals and human fetuses." In the end the Shanes' request was denied.

In the meantime, Edmund and I, with a few other pro-lifers from Milwaukee and Chicago, continued our weekly pilgrimage to the Vital Med loading dock. Antigone had to bury her brother--despite the law, despite the state prohibition. She had to be true to her brother in a way the state could never be. After all, it is the family and not the state that buries the dead. It was Polyneices's sister, Antigone, who poured dust upon his body while Creon forbade it. Teiresias, the blind prophet foretold the curse that would befall the house of Creon:

A time not long to be delayed shall awaken the wailing of men and women in thy house. And a tumult of hatred against thee stirs all the cities whose mangled sons had burial-rite from dogs, or from wild beasts, or from some winged bird that bore a polluting breath to each city that contains the hearths of the dead.

Tragedy followed the unburied corpse of Polyneices. The pagan conscience knew retribution flowed from an atrocity. But it is the true God of mercy who looks down upon the millions of hidden corpses of the aborted unborn who have been cast out of our cities, lost in the sewer lines, lost in the land fills, lost in the smoke of waste incinerators, and denied even a burial of dust.

Chapter 13

Chapter 18

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