Amy Sinclair: "History will judge us for the barbarity of abortion".Sisters of LifeThe pregnant woman who does not want to be a mother is already a mother".September 9 marked the 11th Annual National Day of Remembrance for Aborted Children. The first was held in September of 2013, celebrating the 25th anniversary of a burial in Milwaukee, the first of several important ones.
Across the United States, gatherings and memorial services offered up prayers. They united at Masses and gravesites to mourn and pray for the most vulnerable, the aborted children whose remains now rest at various cemeteries. The Day of Remembrance was observed in 209 locations and 42 states.
Omnes had a chance to speak with Eric Scheidler, the Executive Directorn of the Pro-Action League, who is no stranger to fighting for what is right, as it runs in his blood. His father, Joseph Scheidler, was known as the Godfather of pro-life activism and founded it in 1980. It’s goal is to “save unborn children through non-violent direct action.
When Eric was a young boy, his father saw some pro-life activists holding a picture of a baby as an example of a child who could have been aborted, and because the baby "looked like Eric," his father, Joe, decided he would devote his life to defending life, and that he did. Eric continues his dad's ministry and has taken it to great success.
Rescuing children's bodies
Eric spoke of the initial reasons for this special day and how there's always a Good Samaritan amid the darkness. It was in the late 1980s that a security guard at Vital Med Pathology Lab in Northbrook, Illinois, noticed a suspicious number of boxes stacked up in the loading dock, "…and in those days, the abortion facilities would send their fetal remains for testing…" and the guard discovered that they were aborted fetuses. The man immediately contacted the local pregnancy center, which then reached out to the Pro- Action League, and "we ended up doing a nighttime raid to recover those bodies," shared Eric. He also told of the horror when they found aborted babies behind an abortion facility in Chicago. "They were throwing the bodies of these aborted babies away in a dumpster,” said Eric.
Many years had passed since the horrific findings, and Eric and the league wanted to bring about awareness of the history of the recovery of these bodies.
He then spoke of the Catholic tradition of burial, "… there's this idea that corporal works of mercy like bodily works that you things you do out of compassion for other people in their body, [like] feeding the poor, visiting the sick… one of those corporal works of mercy is burying the dead." He also spoke of the "non-Christian cultures like that of the Greeks, and referred to the Greek play, Antigone, which tells how Antigone, one of the main characters disobeys the rule of law and buries her brother and gets in trouble from the king.
"Burying the dead is an important way of acknowledging their lives had value”, said Eric.
With enormous success and support, the Pro-Life Action League decided to continue to pay tribute annually to the babies whose lives were discarded and whose remains were thrown away.
For the past ten years, they have been "going out to mark the important moments of these critical elements, "not just of all of the children we were able to bury but of the 65 million children who have lost their lives to abortion over the past 50 plus years of legal abortion in the United States".
Tears and peace
This Day of Remembrance has also welcomed much peace for many women, their family members, and the men who fathered the unborn children. Eric shared, for many of the women, "…going out in public and being allowed to mourn for the babies they lost to abortion was a very powerfully healing experience." He also shared one case of a grandmother whose pain was so profound for a grandchild she would never have the chance to know, love, or spoil.
"A grandmother came up to me in tears after one of our services, and she was very upset but incredibly grateful," Scheidler said. "She couldn't stop thanking me for allowing her the opportunity to come out and publicly mourn for her grandchild. She'd found out earlier in the week, through an insurance bill, that her first grandchild had been aborted by her daughter, who was on her health plan."
Overcoming the wounds of abortion
Eric hosted one of the many services held nationwide at Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois, where 2,033 aborted children rest. Auxiliary Bishop Joseph Perry of the Archdiocese of Chicago was a guest speaker and was moved by one woman's regret about her decision years ago.
Eric concluded by saying, "Behind every single abortion, every single one of those 65 million abortions, there's a story… a story of, oh so often there's a misunderstanding, there's coercion, there's pressure… there's turning to God for mercy..." "And that together, we can overcome the wounds of abortion."
