This Saturday, We Again Remember What We Often Refuse to Face

Abortion is very much a topic of our national conversation these days.

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Highlights

By Prolife Leader Frank Pavone, National Director, Priests for Life
9/12/2024 (5 days ago)

Published in Marriage & Family

Keywords: Abortion, Day of Remembrance, Frank Pavone,

For people in the pro-life movement, abortion has always been our single most important issue. Now abortion advocates - including Vice President Kamala Harris - agree with us: There is no more important issue than abortion.

But that's where the agreement ends. Harris, the Democratic party, Hollywood, academia and the legacy media all want to see abortion available throughout pregnancy and funded by U.S. taxpayers. This election season, 10 states will vote on ballot amendments that seek to invent and impose a "right to abortion" in state constitutions.

These abortion absolutists insist that abortion is healthcare, that it ensures "reproductive justice" (whatever that is), that it is a human right, and that it is necessary for women to realize their full potential.

These arguments are not only absurd but they omit the indisputable fact that at least one human being dies in every abortion. And the shameful truth is that in our nation alone, we can count some 66 million victims, almost a fifth of our population.

In 2013, I came up with the idea of setting aside a day and inviting people nationwide to pray at the graves of aborted babies. I took this idea to other national pro-life leaders and this led to the creation of the National Day of Remembrance for Aborted Children, which is celebrated each year on the second Saturday of September, bringing Americans together at gravesites and memorials to the unborn. This Saturday will mark the 12th observance.

The focus of this day is on the physical victims of abortion. We need to take abortion out of the realm of abstract debate and bring it into the concrete humanity we experience each day. It is far too easy to slip into the arena of ideas when we are talking about abortion. Visiting a gravesite where real human beings are buried reinforces that we are talking about the life and death of real people.

To heal the wounds of abortion, we have to reconnect with the humanity of those we have aborted.

Those who participate in services from coast to coast do so out of a desire to make reparation for the lack of reverence with which these victims have been treated. Victims - many of them capable of feeling pain - are killed in a brutal procedure, with their bodies then thrown away as trash, sold for parts, or flushed away. Human beings should not be treated this way.

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Among the things that led me to the idea of establishing this event is that as a priest I have been able to preside at the funerals, memorial services and burials of many aborted babies. And I have always advocated that these be public events, and that we let people see the reality of what abortion does - just like the mother of Emmett Till insisted that her son, killed by the evil of segregation, have an open casket. "I wanted the whole world to see what they did to my boy," she declared.

And I want the whole world to see what abortion did to my youngest brothers and sisters. A sign of the sickness of our times is the fact that some (by no means the majority) went ballistic when I laid an aborted baby on a table and reverently prayed over him, and broadcasted it online. I have never regretted that and never will, and it was only one of many times I have done so.

It is those who complained (including some religious leaders) who need to repent, and speedily, of their narrowness, short-sightedness, and complete cluelessness as to what is needed to end this holocaust.

We cannot end an evil we are unwilling to face.

The proper and necessary response to abortion is a broken heart, and on this National Day of Remembrance, we come together to grieve. Some participants have had abortions or have helped others to do so. They come with regret, sorrow, and a longing for healing. The day also helps to bring people along the path of that healing and invites those who don't know about it yet. It isn't just mothers and fathers who come, but those who, in some way, had something to do with a decision that cost a child his or her life.

On Saturday, we will continue this tradition of honoring the victims of abortion and mourning at their graves to help redirect the conversation away from abortion as healthcare to one of abortion as violence against the most innocent among us, the unborn child in the womb.

To learn more about the day, go to RememberAbortedChildren.org.