'Humanity is not concerned with us'

Editor:

I met a woman who spent some years retrieving bodies of aborted babies from dumpsters outside abortion clinics and arranging Christian burials for them. Ghastly as this work was, it was nothing compared to what she would find on the loading dock of a pathology clinic outside Chicago. There, in "dozens of cardboard boxes strewn haphazardly on the dock," she was to encounter the bodies of thousands of aborted human beings, sent there for disposal from nine clinics in the U.S.

"We had stumbled," she says, "into the middle of a terrible secret...We could stick our hands inside the boxes and come out with fists full of broken bodies...These fetal humans were reduced to a simple mass of impersonal matter, their human individuality crushed out of them." (from Abandoned by Monica Migliorino Miller, Ph.D.)

Upon his entrance into Nazi captivity, the boy Elie Wiesel witnessed pits of fire into which children and babies were thrown, to be burned alive. He told his father it was impossible that in our age, humanity would tolerate the burning of people. "Humanity?" his father replied, "Humanity is not concerned with us. Today anything is allowed." (from Night by Elie Wiesel)

The universal refrain after the atrocities of the Nazi Holocaust was "Never again!" And yet, genocides have taken place since then, again and again: in China, Cambodia, Darfur, Rwanda, Iraq, now Syria....the violence continues. But none of these come near the toll of the abortion genocide, as every year 40 million babies are aborted world-wide, and we mourn 55 million abortion deaths in the U.S. alone since 1973.

The voices of these little ones, never heard this side of Heaven, might challenge us now with the words of one of Hitler's victims: "Humanity? Humanity is not concerned with us!"

As we mark the 40th anniversary of the infamous Roe v. Wade decision, shouldn't we each ask ourselves if we are concerned, and what we can do to end abortion and heal its wounds?

Sondra Jonson