Home News National ‘Day Of Remembrance For Aborted Children’ Memorials Held Across The Country

National ‘Day Of Remembrance For Aborted Children’ Memorials Held Across The Country

Read

Saturday was the seventh annual "Day of Remembrance for Aborted Children." Memorial services were held across the country at dozens of burial sites and other locations.

The official website for the event, which was co-organized by Citizens for a Pro-Life Society, Priests for Life, and the Pro-Life Action League, states in part:

Tens of thousands of these children have been retrieved and buried at gravesites across our country. The stories of how they were killed, how they were found, and how they were buried, along with the pictures and videos that document those events, are powerful tools to awaken the consciences of our fellow citizens. But while a funeral and burial for an aborted baby may be a relatively rare event, the opportunity to visit the burial places and recall how those children got there does not have to be rare — in fact, it shouldn't be.

Those delivering the services, as well as some in attendance, shared images and videos on social media:

The Daily Wire spoke with Eric Scheidler, the executive director of the Pro-Life Action League, to better understand the purpose of the event.

DW: Why is this annual event important?

SCHEIDLER: Well, I think we're seeing why it's important today with this incredible story that has just broken out about Ulrich Klopfer and the 2,246 aborted baby remains that were found in his home. Our society demonizes the unborn child; we treat the unborn child like an enemy. The word "fetus" has become a slur. It’s just the Latin word for "little one," and yet it's become a slur. Our society has turned its back on these children, especially those who are most vulnerable – the poor, the minorities, those who are conceived to young mothers, and an event like this where we go to the gravesites reminds us that lives are cut out by abortion. You visit the graves and you see that every other tombstone in the cemetery has a date of death and a date of birth. These graves don't have a date of birth because these babies were killed before they were born.

There's nothing like standing a few feet away from the grave of 2,033 aborted children who are buried at Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois, standing above that grave and thinking: these children were aborted in 1986, 1987, 1988; they would be in their 30s today; they would have children of their own maybe. Whole generations have been snuffed out by abortion, so that's why it's critical for us to go out and mourn for these children to model for our society the attitude that we ought to have toward the unborn child.

DW: What do you hope happens in the near future, either as a result of this event, or in general in the pro-life movement?

SCHEIDLER: Very specifically, I would like to see more states pass laws like that in Indiana, the one that they're fighting now to keep in Texas, that require a humane burial of the remains of aborted children. Of course we want to save their lives; we want to stop them from being killed; but if our society's gonna tolerate their killing, we should at least be properly burying them and not denying their humanity.

I would like to see more states passing this type of legislation for two reasons. First, it’s our duty and our responsibility to bury the dead. Even when we execute a criminal, when the state decides we're gonna execute somebody, they still bury the body. Just because the government sanctions a killing, it doesn't mean that the victim loses their humanity. So they've decided that human beings in the womb can be killed – it's a horrible injustice – but they don't stop being human beings just because of our unjust laws. We should still provide a humane burial.

Secondly, doing so reminds the rest of our society what abortion really is. We’ve got a society now, thanks in large part to the rhetoric from politicians, that's willing to pretend that these are not human beings, as if we somehow don't know when life begins. We’ve known for over a hundred years exactly how life begins; we've seen it microscopically; we know that when the sperm and the ovum form a unique living organism, that is a human being at its very earliest stages of life. So, it's a lesson to our society that these are human beings.

Third, anything we can do to add to the costs of abortion will help save lives. It’s more expensive for the abortion industry to properly bury these children, just like it's more expensive for them to have health and safety standards. It’s more expensive for them to have physicians doing abortions instead of somebody they trained yesterday, which they've done – we've seen this in the testimony from former abortion staff members that have come over to the pro-life side. So, if this measure helps to make abortion a little harder to get, a little more expensive, a little more burdensome to the abortion industry, so much the better.

Ultimately, what we're trying to do here with this day of remembrance is model to the whole society how we need to address the reality of the past several decades of legal abortion in our country. We all need to be mourning for these children – not just the mothers and fathers who are responsible for those abortions; not just the abortionists; not just the state legislatures who have passed the laws that allowed abortion, or the Supreme Court justices that swept away laws protecting those children, but the whole society. We’re all connected to abortion in one way or another; we're all responsible for it.

When you think about it, so many of the things we do as a pro-life movement, like the March for Life, you know, those are gonna go away. When abortion is finally cast out of our society, whether it's in a few years or whether it's in 500 years, the March for Life, and the sidewalk counseling outside abortion facilities, the protests, all of that's gonna come to an end someday, but the bodies will still be buried in the ground, and the hearts will still be broken, and the generations will still be cut off, and we will continue to mourn for these children. So, we are modeling for our society what the future looks like for America mourning for the incredible injustice that we tolerated in abortion.