Infant Exposure: Newborn Baby Rescued from a Dumpster Reunited with Hero Who Saved Him

what is the difference between the babies found in the trash behind abortion clinics and the babies found in the trash who survive the attempt to kill them?

Michael Buelna is a Police Officer in Santa Ana, California. In 1989 he heard a sound coming from a trash bin. When he looked closely, he discovered a newborn baby boy with his umbilical cord still attached. The child was only four hours old. He weighed four pounds, two ounces. Michael saved the little boy from what would have been a certain death. His mother had dumped him in the trash.

HARRISBURG, PA (Catholic Online) - Michael Buelna is a Police Officer in Santa Ana, California. In 1989 he heard a sound coming from a trash bin. When he looked closely, he discovered a newborn baby boy with his umbilical cord still attached.

The child was only four hours old. He weighed four pounds, two ounces. Michael saved the little boy from what would have been a certain death. His mother had dumped him in the trash.

In a recent interview with a local television station he recounted the experience, "He still had all the mucus and stuff, and all the trash and gravel was sticking to him.  I tried to give him a tiny little bit of breath, and he reacted a little bit."

This good man, who understands the truth about our obligations in solidarity to one another, recently met the child he saved in a beautiful and emotional reunion. Robin Barton is 25 years old now and was raised by an adoptive family.

His birth mother was identified shortly after his rescue. She was arrested and spent three years in prison for child endangerment and attempted murder. Robin has been reunited with his biological father, after he saw the interview on television. He said he had been searching for the child for years.

Robin Barton has still not met his mother, but hopes to do so soon. He told a reporter, "I'm not angry or upset with her, and I forgive her because she was a young woman in a very compromising position."

I have been reporting on the alarming increase in the number of dumpster babies for years.

In 2013 a newborn baby was found in a trash can in Jersey City.  The child was left to die by a mother who simply did not want him or her. Fortunately, teenage boys were hanging out behind the apartment building that Saturday afternoon. They heard the baby cry and saw a trash bag moving.

They ran inside to tell the building superintendent, Arturo Rivas. He called 911. Accompanied by his wife, Rebecca Womers, they ran outside, ripped open the bag, and found the little baby boy. Those teenage boys saved a child. 

The boys told the couple, "We hear something crying, we see something moving." After running outside to the trash can Rebecca Womers said "I opened the bag from the bottom and it still had the umbilical cord attached". 

She cleaned up the baby. He had trash all over him. She was able to see movement in his chest indicating he was breathing. They awaited the arrival of the emergency vehicles. The couple, along with their two little girls, visited the little baby boy in the hospital over the weekend.

The superintendent noted that he has kicked the teenage boys out of the alley in the past but was certainly glad they were back there over the weekend. New Jersey has a Safe Haven Infant Protection Act which allows a person to give up an unwanted infant safely, legally and anonymously within thirty days of their birth by dropping the baby off at a police or fire station, or a hospital.

In 2011, an incident took place in New York. In that case the mother self aborted her child and then threw the dead baby in the trash.  She drank an herbal mix which was considered an abortion-causing tea. Let's call the concoction what it really was, child killing poison.

It's now become common practice and is called a medical abortion.

In 2010, they discovered seventeen dead babies killed by abortion. They had been placed in medical zip lock bags with the names of their mothers labeled on the outside. They were found in a dumpster at the Womans Choice abortion Clinic in Lansing, Michigan.

Under Michigan law abortion facilities can place aborted babies in the trash as long as they're dipped in formaldehyde beforehand. They are considered biohazardous waste.

That same month two newborns were found in a trash container in Calgary and rescued. They had been placed in plastic bags by their own mothers, not by abortionists. I asked a question back then which I now repeat today - what is the difference between the babies found in the trash behind abortion clinics and the babies found in the trash who survive the attempt to kill them?

Two very important things; first, they were still alive, and second, they were rescued.

It is time to be brutally honest. Every procured abortion kills a child through the injection of poison, saline burning, the collapsing of their skull, or the severing of their limbs - and we do not hear about it. We have closed our eyes to the truth of what is going on in our Nation.

Babies are treated as trash. 

Stories of rescuing babies from the trash call us to examine what we are becoming. We are killing our children based upon the sole criteria of convenience and whether they are wanted. That is the true effect of legal abortion on demand. It is certainly not about choice for the child. They have none. Not only are they losing their lives, we are losing our national soul.

Thousands of children are routinely killed every day in the United States. You can watch the numbers here. This death watch count will soon exceed 60 million!  Usually, the disposal of their little bodies is hidden from our eyes. After all, if we saw what we were doing we would react like we do to the stories about babies being rescued from trash bins. Or would we?

We do not ever see what a real abortion really looks like. When people try to show us graphic images of the remains of a child killed by abortion, they are called extremists. In fact, what is extreme is the violence being committed against the victim child. Oh, and let's talk about Rights. His or her fundamental Human Right to Life is now completely disregarded.

Our unwanted children are being aborted and thrown into dumpsters as medical waste! In addition, in some instances, children who are not wanted after birth are being placed in dumpsters. This situation amounts to a modern resurgence of the ancient pagan practice once called exposure.

Exposure was practiced in the cultures into which the early Christian church was sent on mission. Unwanted babies were left out on rocks to be eaten by birds of prey or taken by slave traders.  It was the Christians who saved them and transformed those cultures from cultures of death into cultures of life.

These contemporary examples substitute a trash can or a dumpster for the rock. We must take up the task of rescuing them in this hour. We must also be honest about what is happening. Children are being treated as trash.

When we read about people leaving their newborn children in the trash, what is left of a conscience properly responds. We know it is wrong. It is so obvious. However, every procured abortion kills a child. It is done through the injection of poison, saline burning, the collapsing of their skull, the severing of their limbs and we do not hear or read about it.

The truth concerning the humanity of the child in the womb and their fundamental Human Right to be born is beginning to win the hearts and minds of more people daily. Medical Science is a true Pro-Life ally. Sonograms showing us a film of our first neighbors in their first home in the womb have become commonplace. We watch these children smile, play, feel pain and grow. The images are showing up on television commercials, and being sent over our smart phones.

This is a sure sign in a consumerist culture that this technology is having a positive effect. Only a deceived person can see that child in the womb as anything other than just that, a child, a human person, and our neighbor.

Physicians are routinely operating in utero -to help these children in need - and placing them back in the first home of the womb to be delivered full term. Parents are playing music to children in the womb. Psychologists encourage communication between parents and their child in the womb.

A 2013 report from the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences confirmed that babies in the womb hear what their mothers say to them when they are in the womb. They also remember it once they are born. The findings demonstrate that children in the womb can learn.

The efforts to use dehumanizing phrases to hide the perfidy of procured abortion are failing and the tide is turning. Medical science and technology confirm what our conscience told us all along, the child in the first home of the whole human race is our neighbor and it is wrong to kill innocent neighbors.

However, the evil of procured abortion is still protected by the civil law. Those who commit the horrid evil are protected by the police power of the State. There are times when the evil of procured abortion becomes obvious and the Nation is shaken.

I hope the discovery of this little baby boy in the trash can - and the wonderful account of his reunion with the heroic officer who rescued him twenty five years later, is one of those times.

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Deacon Keith A. Fournier is Founder and Chairman of Common Good Foundation and Common Good Alliance. A married Roman Catholic Deacon of the Diocese of Richmond, Virginia, he and his wife Laurine have five grown children and seven grandchildren. He is a human rights lawyer and public policy advocate who served as the first and founding Executive Director of the American Center for Law and Justice in the nineteen nineties and has long been active at the intersection of faith and culture. He serves as Special Counsel to Liberty Counsel. He is a senior contributing writer to The Stream.

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