In February 2010 Michigan pro-life activist Chris Veneklase decided to take a look in the trash dumpster used by the Woman’s Choice Clinic in Lansing.
He found the remains of 17 aborted babies—killed at the clinic and tossed in the trash. The date of the abortion, and all of the names of the mothers were written on the medical baggies that contained the tiny dismembered human bodies of these children. They had all been aborted in January of that year and all in the first 10 weeks of gestation.
Chris Veneklase called me, the director of Citizens for a Pro-Life Society, as I have had extensive experience with the retrievals of aborted babies from clinic trash containers and the burials for these victims of abortion.
One of the things that I did was photograph the aborted babies Chris had found in the Woman’s Choice dumpster. Their photos are can seen here.
One of the photos was of a tiny arm and hand of a 7 week aborted baby, torn at the shoulder. This photo was printed in my book Abandoned: The Untold Story of the Abortion Wars, published in 2012 by Saint Benedict Press.
In the meantime, Mary Gilpin, the manager of a crisis pregnancy center in Milwaukee, had purchased a copy of Abandoned and kept the book at the CPC.
In October a woman came to the CPC intent on having an abortion. She justified her decision because she was only 7 weeks pregnant and was convinced that the baby was not formed yet, was not human, that “nothing was there”—thus she was not killing anyone!
Mary opened my book and showed her a photo (see right) that I had taken—a photo of one of the babies that Chris Veneklase had retrieved from the trash. The woman was immediately stunned by what she saw—a real hand of a real human being at 7 weeks gestational age!
The abortion-bound woman changed her mind against having the abortion—and her baby is alive today.
This story bears a few important lessons. Consider the links in this pro-life victory:
- First, pro-life activist Chris Veneklase, took the aborted unborn out of the trash
- Eileen Coleman, another pro-lifer, lent a state-of-the-art high definition digital camera to your CPLS director.
- Your CPLS director took the photos of the aborted babies.
- Saint Benedict Press– a great Catholic publisher–publishes Abandonedand agrees to feature abortion victim photos in the book that includes this one of the 7 week aborted baby from the Woman’s Choice clinic.
- Mary Gilpin, a long-time pro-life crisis pregnancy counselor shows this photo to a woman who was intent on getting an abortion…
And the baby is saved.
When I told this story to Chris Veneklase, he thanked God for what he called the “symphony of good.” That is a truly apt description of just what happened here: many people doing good things worked together in the providence of God to save a baby from abortion.
Please also consider how amazing it is that this aborted baby saved another unborn child from suffering the injustice of abortion. The Woman’s Choice clinic, its abortionist and staff, who all conspired to kill this baby, worked to keep this unborn child forever hidden—consigning this human life to the bottom of a trash dumpster where he or she was meant to be forever lost and dismissed—as if this human being had never existed.
But because a courageous pro-lifer went into that dumpster to search for the unwanted and the lost, because someone photographed this broken body, because a publisher printed that photo in her book and because a pro-lifer showed that photo in the book to a woman seeking an abortion—this aborted unborn child spoke his truth: the truth of his humanity and the truth of his existence, and called a mother to honor the life of her baby!
The Woman’s Choice clinic didn’t win. Abortion didn’t win.
The “symphony of good” won—and this tiny unwanted unborn child did not die in vain!
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