By now, most of you will have heard the chilling story out of South Bend, Illinois. According to the sheriff’s office, “2,246 preserved fetal remains” were found in the home of the late abortionist Dr. Ulrich Klopfer, who died earlier this month. And by “fetal remains,” they mean dead babies, killed by abortion, preserved as trophies in their thousands. Each of the babies was sealed in an individual plastic bag in a preservative called Formalin, and each bag was carefully labeled. There were 70 cardboard boxes full of aborted babies in total. Apparently, the children in the bags were aborted between 2000 and 2002, which means that they would be between the ages of 19 and 17 if Klopfer hadn’t killed them. At the time, he was running abortion clinics in South bend, Fort Wayne, and Gary, Indiana.
Klopfer, who aborted some 30,000 babies over four decades, had his medical license suspended in 2016 for consistently failing to report cases of sexual abuse. Girls would end up in his clinic after being assaulted and, rather than calling the police, Klopfer would perform abortions on them and send them on their way (not an uncommon practice in the abortion industry.) One rape victim, Serena Dyksen, remembers being taken to Klopfer’s clinic in South Bend after being raped by her uncle as a very young girl. She recounted her horrifying experience in an op-ed after hearing the news that Klopfer had kept thousands of aborted babies in bags—and her awful realization that her baby could be preserved somewhere in the deceased abortionist’s garage:
As I lay on the table, I suddenly heard a loud vacuuming sound – the unforgettably disturbing suction noise was much louder than our vacuum cleaner at home — and then I experienced the most excruciating pain I had ever felt. I began screaming in agony only to have Dr. Klopfer yell at me to stop making noise. I remember being shocked that this doctor yelled at me. How could he not care?!
Many years later, I discovered a journal of my mom’s with an entry about that day — she wrote that from the waiting room she could hear me screaming, but they would not allow her to come back with me. It was heartbreaking to read. My mom and I still have not talked about it, and my dad won’t talk about it either. They are not even together today. I know that if they had heard my story now, they would never have chosen abortion then.
Once the procedure finished, I was taken to a recovery room with other women. We all just sat there, not making eye contact. I was completely numb and disconnected. When I was told it was time for me to leave, I stood up only to hemorrhage – gushing blood all over myself and the floor. Nobody brought the doctor in – they just hurried me out of the clinic while hemorrhaging. I was so weak and could hardly stand that my dad had to carry me out to the car. There was never a follow-up visit at the clinic, and the abortion was never talked about again with my family.
Even though I was 13 and had no clue about motherhood, I suffered horribly from my abortion. I would struggle every single holiday and did not understand why. I battled depression, had a miscarriage, my ovary ruptured — nearly losing my life, and I had a complete hysterectomy before the age of 29. All of the major reproductive issues I was having made no sense, but not one doctor asked if I had a history of abortion.
Even after much healing and attending a post-abortive retreat, hearing the news of over 2200 babies’ remains on Klopfer’s property stirred up so many emotions. I feel like I have been violated all over again – now for a third time. Friday night when I first saw the story, my whole body went numb from shock. That shock turned into lying in bed, sobbing at the thought of my baby being on his property. I questioned why he had kept their remains and I realized they were probably trophies to him. My child’s dead body was his trophy. The grief was overwhelming…
As a woman who has suffered through and from abortion, I’m asking that a full investigation be done, including DNA testing to match these sons and daughters to their mothers who want them for a proper funeral and burial. I want to know if my child is one of them and I want her remains so I have a place to honor her. Maybe she will know that her mother wants her and loves her. And for those whose mothers don’t come forward to claim them, they still deserve the same dignity because multitudes grieve the loss of their lives. If Klopfer can keep these babies unaccountably for years, we should be able to provide them a permanent place to be remembered in a dignified way.
Think about it for a moment. Babies in bags—stacks and stacks of them. But under law, Klopfer was allowed to kill them. People are shocked that he kept them once he killed them, but that, too, shows the bizarre incoherence of the abortion worldview: We can kill babies and stuff them in bags, but to save the bags of babies—that’s just creepy. We are supposed to throw them away or incinerate them like the garbage they are. That would make everyone feel better.
For days, Democratic presidential candidate Mayor Pete Buttigieg dodged addressing the story, and when he finally did, he referred obliquely to the “news out of Illinois,” which ignored the fact that this macabre ghoul worked in South Bend until 2016, under the benevolent reign of the supportive Mayor Pete. Buttigieg’s reaction was classic and disgusting: Although the story was obviously disturbing and needed full investigation, he commented uncomfortably, he hopes that all those dead babies don’t “distract” us from throaty support of “women’s reproductive health.”
To sum up Buttigieg’s position: He doesn’t want bags of dead babies to distract us from supporting the procedure that killed those babies so that they ended up in bags in the first place. Men like Buttigieg aren’t upset that Klopfer killed the babies—that is just fine. They are upset that nobody got rid of the dead babies once Klopfer was through with them. Now that they have been discovered, uncomfortable questions are being asked, and Democratic presidential candidates like Buttigieg prefer to address the abortion issue in broad, general terms, avoiding the ugly reality of what this is actually all about: Dead babies.
Buttigieg, incidentally, is primarily popular because he’s another one of those tiresome hacks who is weaponizing Christianity against Christians, a popular party trick among LGBT activists with a potent sense of irony. The only time progressives discover piety, of course, is when they wish to condemn Christian views as wicked, and late night hosts and others who generally enjoy mocking Christians become almost pink with glee when Buttigieg condemns various Christians for refusing to hold the sorts of positions he does, such as supporting abortion right up until the moment of birth (and perhaps after—he indicated that his reading of the Bible says babies might not be human until after they take their first breath.)
Despite what the sanctimonious and insufferable Buttigieg has to say, these 2,246 corpses should distract us. They should distract us from his pathetic attempts to cover for the abortion industry, and highlight the fact that his version of Christianity is one where babies can be butchered—and that this can be celebrated. Mayor Pete should head home to South Bend, and drive down to Klopfer’s garage. Then, he should help the sheriff’s office unpack those seventy boxes of babies in bags, one by one. He should look at their tiny arms and legs, their lifeless eyes, their little faces.
And then, if he has any heart at all, he should weep.
