History Shows Us That We Can Stop Abortion

The Walk for Life is this weekend in San Francisco. In thinking about the holocaust of babies, I came across a picture of four doctors posing together at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival; Doctors LeRoy Carhart, Warren Hern, Susan Robinson and Shelley Sella.
Three out of the four seem to be having a nice time. They were the subjects of the documentary After Tiller. (Dr. George Tiller, a late-term abortion provider, was murdered in 2009.) The doctors were most likely standing on a red carpet, a place of honor. Dubious distinction I would suggest.

They are the only four physicians in the U.S. who perform third-trimester abortions.

Please take a moment and look at the faces in the picture. If you’re like me, a flood of thoughts and emotions will pour over mind and body. Clearly, they are dedicated. They know the personal risks. Is care or even love for their pregnant patient their overriding concern? Or something else? I don’t know these people but I would like to—so that we could talk. Individually would be best. I would listen with as much compassion as I could muster then I’d pray that the Holy Spirit guide me. So that I could convince them to stop.

Dr. Robinson, who worked with Dr. Tiller, said, “We learned at his knee. Kindness, courtesy, justice, love and respect are the hallmarks of a good doctor-patient relationship.”

The irony of that statement doesn’t need my amplification.
Evil takes great delight in these special moments of history. Where man’s conscience can be twisted and unspeakable acts follow. The larger the scale, the better. This evil, as taught by the Catechism, “is permitted by divine providence which with strength and gentleness guides human and cosmic history. It is a great mystery that providence should permit diabolical activity, but ‘we know that in everything God works for good with those who love Him.’”

When malevolence swallows up children–the mystery none of us will ever grasp and the source of so much unbelief–we recoil in horror. But evil can be stopped. History has examples. There is hope.

As the exiles moved, they left behind them another caravan – that of dead and unburied bodies, of old men and of women dying in the last stages of typhus, dysentery, and cholera, of little children lying on their backs and setting up their last piteous wails for food and water. There were women who held up their babies to strangers, begging them to take them and save them from their tormentors, and failing this, they would throw them into wells or leave them behind bushes, that at least they might die undisturbed. (Eyewitness account during the Armenian genocide which ended in 1923.)

The nurse told me the child’s name was Valentina. She was 13. Her hand had been chopped in half and the wound had become infected. It had taken on an ominous black color. In addition, there were two deep gashes on the back of her head. Valentina said they asked people to hand over their money, saying they would spare those who paid. But after taking the money they killed them anyway. The leader said that they were snakes and that to kill snakes you had to smash their heads. The killers had moved into the terrified crowd of men, women and children, hacking and clubbing as they went. “If they found someone alive they would smash their heads with stones. I saw them take little children and smash their heads together until they were dead. There were children begging for pity but they killed them straight away,” she told me. Other infants, crying on the ground beside their murdered parents, were taken and plunged head first into latrines. (Reportage on the Rwandan genocide which ended in 1994.)

In a corner next to the gate I noticed a young woman and her child. Her lips tightly pressed together looked like a scar. She gazed at her small daughter then, stroking her, she slowly undressed her. Older children, as alarmed as their parents, began slowly to take off their clothes. Meanwhile the representatives of the SS hierarchy stood on the earthworks which had been thrown up on the roof of the crematorium. From there they had a bird’s-eye view of what was going on. At first they did not intervene, leaving everything to their minions. But the alarm and disquiet of the people grew quickly as did their fear of the danger they could sense: they were taking off their clothes with great deliberation in order to gain time. The young mother in the corner by the gate was soon holding her child on her arm. She, too, was now undressed. She was not ashamed of her nakedness, but the premonition that perhaps she had undressed her child and herself for the last time put her into a state of helpless submission to God’s will. (An eyewitness observation of a woman and her child at Auschwitz. The Jewish genocide ended in 1945.)

The glass container was half full and splattered with blood. Even the tube that fed into the container was crusted with blood. What I saw inside the collection container defies belief, little baby parts swimming in a bloody muck. All those graphic photos you’ve ever seen of tiny dismembered arms and legs are accurate. Only this wasn’t just one set of tiny arms and legs–this was more than I could count. This wasn’t just one baby that was aborted and some careless worker forget to remove from the room. This looked like all the babies that had been aborted that day. All together in one glass container, swimming in a gruesome soup of blood and bits. They hadn’t even bothered to clean the equipment between patients and I suddenly realized they had every intention of using the same filthy equipment on me. (Katrina Fernandez – An eyewitness to the American genocide that has not yet ended.)

A mother holding her child over a well, the indescribable seconds of desperation, indecision and heart breaking torment, then the release to a dark, wet death. A scream to heaven.

An innocent young girl hacked as if she were a stubborn weed. The whooshing of the blade. And again. And again.
The anguish of a young mother, her only child held close. Their naked skin seared by fear, their eyes communicate their shared panic. Bodily form now, soon to be ashes.

And in our time…

A young woman, scarred for life by the accepted genocide of our time. Never to hold her child. An eyewitness to the modernity of evil practiced by efficient, filthy minions. 55,000,000 innocent lives taken and counting.
Genocide can be stopped. Lord hear our prayers. Show us how to battle abortion.