Years ago, I came up with the idea of a special day that would invite people nationwide to come together and pray at the graves of children lost to abortion.
Together with my colleagues in pro-life leadership, we created the National Day of Remembrance for Aborted Children, which will mark its 10th anniversary this Saturday, Sept. 9. The event honors our brothers and sisters killed by abortion, encourages reverence for the sanctity of life, and calls on pro-life Americans to gather at the gravesites of these children and look to God for guidance.
Solemn prayer vigils will be conducted at hundreds of these gravesites, in dedication to our lost children. Visiting these burial places cuts through any rhetoric surrounding abortion and moves this conversation from the abstract into concrete reality.
After all, we have burial services not for “concepts,” but for human beings.
Over the years I have been blessed to lead many of these services, and the experience has struck me profoundly. Leading these prayers, I have seen the impact these ceremonies have on the participants. It is sanity in the midst of insanity, and a proper response to children losing their lives, rather than a twisted celebration of a “reproductive right” to kill, that doesn’t truly exist.
Abortion is insanity.
Some gravesites contain hundreds and even thousands of babies in one burial plot. Many times, the remains were discovered in trash dumpsters outside abortion businesses. In one case, in the early 1980’s, workers in California discovered a large container with the bodies of 16,500 aborted babies in it. Pro-life citizens wanted to do what every civilized society does, and lay them to rest. But because of the opposition of abortion supporters, that did not happen until a three-year legal battle was settled.
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Why did people fight so hard against burying these babies? Because abortion advocates avoid anything that will reinforce the humanity of unborn children, which is exactly what the Day of Remembrance seeks to do. That is the power of the day.
More recently, the discovery of the remains of 5 babies inside the house of a pro-life activist has made headlines. Activist Lauren Handy has stated they were given to her by the driver of a medical waste truck that was collecting remains from the office of Cesare Santangelo, the abortionist whose northwest Washington abortion mill Handy and four others were protesting when they were arrested.
The five children were aborted so late in their mothers’ pregnancies that activists believe Santangelo used an illegal partial-birth abortion procedure. Demands that the DC medical examiner perform autopsies on these babies have been made, but the office has refused.
Most every news story about Handy’s recent conviction on the protest charge has mentioned the babies, as the media works to shape the narrative. The fact that full-term babies were aborted, perhaps illegally, is never mentioned. The only crime, we are told, is that they were found in Handy’s freezer.
Abortion is not a crime. Apparently, caring about its victims, is.
Atrocities like these demonstrate clearly that something about the soul of an abortionist is not right. In my work with former abortionists, I’ve seen how they hide in horror from the reality that they have murdered children.
The bodies of these babies have a story to tell. Their very presence at notorious abortionist Kermit Gosnell’s trial led to his conviction of first-degree murder in the deaths of three, because their remains speak an unavoidable truth.
No amount of media spin, or indifference, can change the fact that 65 million children in our nation have been killed because they were inconvenient, unwanted or imperfect.
It’s important during this year’s observance of the National Day of Remembrance for Aborted Children that we remember on the bodies of the Santangelo babies, the Gosnell babies, the 16,000 babies buried in California and the body of every baby torn apart by abortion.
On September 9th, thousands of Americans will gather to remember them, pray for them, and promise them we will continue working toward the day when babies in the womb will remain safe. I hope you will be one of them.
About the author
LifeNews Note: Frank Pavone is National Director of Priests for Life, the leading pro-life organization in the U.S. Pavone co-founded the National Day of Remembrance, leads EndAbortion.US, and has been named one of the 50 pro-life leaders most responsible for the overturn of Roe vs. Wade.
