Chapter Twenty One

Requiem

“There is no God who condones the taking of an innocent human life. This much we know.”  - Barack Obama

 “Are memories now so brief,” he said, And conscience so defiled? Don’t you know me as your son? I’m home” said the Holocaust child. - Nancy Murray   

I remember her face. I remember everything about the woman—her light brown skin, her dark brown eyes, the way she hung her head and tried to fight back her tears. It was a cold October morning outside of the Summit Women's Health Organization. Her boyfriend had just dropped her off at the corner of 6th and Wisconsin, at the foot of a tall downtown office building.

“I’ve got to do it,” she said.  “I know it’s wrong, but I got to.”

“But, Carolyn, you see this picture of what abortion will do to your baby. You know this is a human life, a human being, your own child.  Please, let me help you.”

The street corner was busy with people hurrying to and fro, and the noise of the traffic competed with the sound of our voices.  The world around us was oblivious to the life-and-death struggle playing out on this grey city street. Carolyn started anxiously towards the heavy glass revolving doors, and I followed after her, still pleading.

“Carolyn, at least give yourself one more day to think it over.  Your baby’s worth at least one more day.”

“That’s true,” she replied, still walking towards the building.

“Come on, Carolyn. Come with me. Let’s get a cup of coffee and we’ll talk.”

But her hand was already on the revolving door. “I’ll read your pamphlet. I’ll think it over while I’m up there.”

In another instant she was inside the building, her figure blending into the darkness of the lobby. I called after her, but she was gone.

So close. She was listening to me. She even told me her name. She had taken my literature. She seemed hesitant to confirm her choice—but in the end she walked through the doors and disappeared. Another loss. Another tragedy.  I would feel regret and sorrow for days afterward. And I would mourn for the loss of her baby.

Somehow, almost inexplicably, I missed her child. How, beyond words and pictures and philosophies, could I miss a person never born?  I did not know this life, nor the millions of others who perished in abortion. I did not have what our culture calls a “meaningful relationship” with this unborn baby slated for abortion. But the suffering of my heart told me, on an intimately personal level, that the slain preborn were really here once, and now they are gone, as though banished from the world.

I feel the loss of the aborted most acutely not during times of sorrow but during times of happiness when my soul is most stirred by human beauty and the splendor of the created world. In 1986 I attended my first Wisconsin State Fair with my friend Chris Le Blanc. We went to a tent set up by the Mexican Cultural Center to get something to eat.  Inside, men and women dressed in festive costumes were dancing, matched in pairs, to traditional Mexican music. They danced with an explosion of precision, harmony, and joy. The faces of the Hispanic dancers were wreathed in smiles. As I carefully watched the dancers’ steps, I was immediately swept into the happiness of the dance and mesmerized until suddenly I felt a deep pain well up within me, and tears came to my eyes. Someone was missing. Indeed, many were missing, others who should have been there with us. I perceived the absence of the aborted unborn as if there was an empty hole in the world that could not be filled. The lively dancers brought me to the edge of it, to mourn.

As a pro-life activist, I am caught in the agony of a desperate time.  That moment which crushes the life of the unborn also crushes my heart; and when that moment seizes you, it is no longer possible to live a normal life, as though the world were a normal place. Legalized abortion made me a rebel against society. My life is lived against it, in contradiction to it. I know the absolute absurdity of a world where men and women kill their unborn children and call it a right.

At times I thought I would be a better pro-lifer if I were more detached, that is, if I could stand emotionally aloof from the women and their preborn children;  I even prayed for this kind of disconnection. But perhaps the only reason a person makes efforts to defend the unborn is precisely because that person knows he or she is not detached. I do pro-life work because I am attached. I am attached to the woman going into the clinic. I am attached to her baby. I am even attached to the abortionist. The true pro-lifer is invested in all humanity, who can see another personal someone in the smallest speck of human life.

One day in the early evening I happened to pass by the Milwaukee Women’s Health Organization on 12th and State. It was October 1987. Elinor Yeo’s abortion clinic had been permanently closed for weeks. Just a few days after it closed Citizens for Life held a small celebration on the sidewalk outside. The building was empty now, shut up and dark. I spontaneously decided to pull my car into the clinic’s side drive. I had been arrested there in 1986 and how strange it felt to now be on the clinic property with no one there to yell at me or to call the police. I parked in the rear where the employees used to park. I sat in the car for a few moments and prayed for all the women who had ever entered the clinic’s doors and for the fetal children who had died there.

While I sat, I spied a rusty trash barrel in the parking lot. I got out of my car, walked over to it, and peered inside. Five months ago I had helped retrieve aborted babies from the trash behind the Michigan Avenue Medical Center. I had apprehension and fear that perhaps I would find fetal remains here as well. But there were none. At the top of the barrel were cleaning rags and papers and dirt from a vacuum cleaner bag, apparently all thrown out when the clinic staff did their last-minute cleaning. I pushed this trash aside and looked towards the bottom of the barrel. I saw a few used syringes and then I saw suction curettes with blood still inside of them. There was also bloody gauze and soiled blue paper sheets used for lining the surgical tables.

I had never seen a suction curette. I peered at one, struck by the likelihood that it had been used in the killing of an unborn child—that the body of a tiny life had passed through it. I wrapped it up in a piece of newsprint and took it with me as a memorial of that unborn child’s death.

As I continued to look in the barrel I came across a piece of paper. Typed on it were instructions on how to prepare the “POCs” for transfer to a pathology lab. The words were hastily written and full of misspellings. The top of the sheet bore the date 11/22/85.

Weigh speciman

Fill out required information on the white slip

Add formalin to cover spec. and swish it around

Remove the tape with name on it from spec. container and

put on plastic bag

Drain formalin from speciman and slip the

speciman into

plastic bag

Seal and put in refrigerator

*specimans to be sent for path. are prepared in the

same way

                                                          ***********

On June 2, 1993, I drove home from a hearing at the Milwaukee County Court House in which a 1987 charge of criminal trespass to a medical facility was finally dismissed. Jeff Kremers had charged Edmund and me with this crime because we had entered the waiting room of Affiliated Medical Services to talk to a woman, whom I had initially spoken to on the street outside of the clinic. I was feeling extremely happy that, after five years of litigation, this case was resolved in my favor. On my way home from court, I again passed by the building that was once the Milwaukee Women’s Health Organization, where Citizens for Life had held their small celebration a few years earlier.

I immediately stopped my car. The building was in shambles, less than a third of it still standing. The building that once was one of Milwaukee’s busiest abortion clinics was being demolished. I parked my car on the street and walked over to the crumbling walls. The center of the building was entirely gutted and exposed. With the walls toppled and the roof torn away, the barren, open space beckoned to me, whispering its sorrows and secrets.

I entered the empty space and marked where the procedure rooms used to be and prayed for all the babies who had died in them, for all the women who had come there, and for all the clinic workers. Now this place of death was being destroyed. Like the unborn killed there, it too would vanish. I was struck by the odd feeling that this place should not be destroyed; some piece of this place should stand as a monument to the thousands of lives lost within its walls.

Later that same evening I went back to the site. It was dusk now and raining, and I stood all alone in the heart of this eviscerated building. I picked my way out through the crumpled walls to the back of the clinic. There was a steep stairway leading down to a basement door. I made the descent and found the door standing open. I looked into the darkness and studied the shadows. Someone once told me the recovery rooms were down here. There were holes in the ceiling from the demolition and rain was dripping into the basement. The silence was broken only by the clear sound of splashing water echoing through the murky shadows. 

**********

Sometimes I can still smell the babies. Some odor will unexpectedly seem like the smell of blood and formalin and take me back to them. Sometimes I am still reminded of the little broken bodies. A child’s hand or a baby’s foot will bring me back to the alleys and the loading docks. Edmund and I often take trips between Milwaukee and Chicago with our children. I look at them nestled in the back seat of the car, their long-lashed eyes closed in peaceful sleep. I am drawn in by their beauty and their innocence. If we go to Chicago or to my parents’ home, we pass by a fork in the expressway. There the building that once housed the Vital Med laboratory still stands. I know where I am and turn my face to see the door we once passed through. It led us to the edge of the world, where the broken bodies of the innocent unborn were cast away.

I turn my face to the building and stare until I can no longer see it. Our car speeds on with a hundred others, riders unaware of what they have just passed.  If someone looks my way, he will see a woman cross herself and maybe think it strange. But I mark the place of the vanished unborn, and offer up a silent prayer in requiem. My heart affirms, in memory of them, the triumph-song of life.

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