As the 2411 aborted babies found on the properties of abortionist Ulrich Klopfer are laid to rest, it’s some measure of comfort to know that each of them has been named, by pro-life people across the nation. Priests for Life and Citizens for a Pro-life Society invited grassroots pro-life people to offer a name for these children in the weeks following the discovery. And it didn’t take long.
Yet we know that some 61 million children have been killed by abortion in the United States. They are not statistics; they are persons, and it’s time to give them each a name as well!
We have become dehumanized by a culture that permits abortion. When culture and law fail to consider the unborn as persons, not only are those children dehumanized, but so are those who kill them, and so are the rest of us.
We all need repentance and healing. We need to be re-humanized. (If you have had an abortion, find healing ministries at AbortionForgiveness.com.)
Building a culture of life includes changing the way we all think, speak and act toward the children who are living in the womb, and those who died before birth. Together, we must learn to treat them as persons.
And something we all know is that every person has a name.
Mourning the children who have been killed by abortion, remembering them, burying them (when we have their remains), and giving them a name, is part of the process of re-humanizing them, our society, and ourselves.
The first people, of course, who are entrusted with naming their children are the parents. In my role as Pastoral Director of both Rachel’s Vineyard and of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign, my team and I assist such parents who mourn the children they lost through abortion. Part of that grieving process is to name the children.
It is at that part of the healing process that, after the parents (or other family members) have thought about the death of their child, they begin to focus on the child’s life, and reclaim a spiritual relationship with that child, whom they have entrusted to the Lord.
Click Like if you are pro-life to like the LifeNews Facebook page!
But for most aborted children, this never happens. They have been completely abandoned. And we have all been made less in the process.
That’s why we all can and should be part of the process of re-humanizing these children, and ourselves. And this project gives us a chance to do that by giving the children a name.
God has entrusted us all to the care of one another; we are one human family. In the sight of God, there is no such thing as a stranger – we are all brothers and sisters.
Psalm 27:10 says, “Though father and mother forsake me, the Lord will receive me.” Many fathers and mothers have forsaken their aborted children. But the Lord receives them.
We also know Biblically, as Saint Paul tells us, that we are the Body of Christ, and individually members of it (see 1 Cor. 12:27). If, therefore, “the Lord” receives those children, our brothers and sisters, who have been aborted, then he receives them also through us, as His Body alive and active in the world, spreading his nurturing love, compassion, and kindness.
St. John Paul II pointed out in “The Gospel of Life,” “The God of the Covenant has entrusted the life of every individual to his or her fellow human beings, brothers and sisters” (The Gospel of Life, n. 76).
As parents who grieve and name their aborted children reclaim a sense of their own motherhood or fatherhood, so we who grieve and name the hundreds of millions of forgotten children reclaim a sense of our brotherhood and sisterhood with them.
And therefore, in the name of the Lord, we can care for our brothers and sisters who have been abandoned by abortion, just as we care for our brothers and sisters whose parents abandon them at other stages of life. That care includes acknowledging their personhood by giving them the name their parents failed to give them.
We have therefore launched the project NameTheChildren.org, which gives you a chance to bestow a name on a forgotten aborted child. The site describes different ways to name the children; some people choose to even give their own last name to the child as a way of adopting them into their family.
Those who participate in this project can do so anonymously, or, alternatively, may want to request a certificate in memory of the child.
As this project gets underway, there will be special efforts that are geographically based; for instance, in various cities, there are gravesites where hundreds and in some cases thousands of aborted children are buried. It would seem appropriate for the people of that community to name the children buried there.
Along with bestowing a name, we invite all to join in a special prayer for all these aborted babies which can be found on the project website.
May our naming of these children bring us closer to the day when the all the children in the womb will be recognized, respected and protected as the persons they already are!