We pulled our cars slowly into the dark alley. Rats scurried before our headlights, frightened by the noise of our intrusion. Our three-vehicle caravan parked in the alley off Monroe Street, near Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago. We stopped in front of a loading dock upon which stood three garbage dumpsters and a filthy blue trash barrel. The address, 30 South Michigan, was crudely painted on the barrel in white lettering. It had rained in the Loop earlier that day, and the alley pavement shone with a slimy oil. We turned off our engines and headlights and paused for a moment. We looked around to make sure no one else was about. The stench of rotting garbage nearly overwhelmed the eight of us as we slowly and quietly got out of our cars. We climbed onto the loading dock, lifted the dumpster lids, and began to sift through the trash. I opened the lid on a bright red dumpster and yanked out a bag of garbage. Peering into the very bottom of the dumpster I saw a bag that was baby blue in color. As I hauled the bag out, I noticed it was heavier than the others. I rested it on the loading dock and opened it. The top of the bag was stuffed with bloody surgical paper. Underneath the blue bag was a small, heavy cardboard box, about the size of two shoe boxes, sealed in silver duct tape. I pulled the box out, carefully cradling it in my arms, and placed it in the back seat of one of the cars. All the other bags were returned to the dumpster and replaced to look as though nothing had been disturbed. As we pulled out of the alley, rats again darted in front of our headlights. One scampered across the top of a dumpster as our car made its way down the wet and oily path and out into the street.

We made the short drive to the northwest side of Chicago and parked our cars outside a garage at the home of a middle-aged man named Joseph Scheidler. I lifted the cardboard box, carried it into the garage, and set it down on a card table beneath a bright utility light. We all gathered around the table and stood in apprehension as the silver duct tape was carefully peeled off the box and the flaps opened. I peered inside and saw small plastic specimen bags, known as Whirl-Paks, each filled with a dark reddish liquid. We took the bags out and laid them on the table. There were forty-three altogether.

Several bags were marked with a woman's name, age, a date, and two numbers. The smaller number told us the gestational age of the aborted fetus contained within. We thought the other number indicated the amount of abortions performed at the Michigan Avenue Medical Center since the beginning of the year. As of this Saturday night, March 14, 1987, the number was in the three thousands.

On this cool evening, five of us made the midnight run to the alley behind the abortion clinic and then to Joe Scheidler’s garage. Joe, the founder and executive director of the Pro-Life Action League, had already attracted national media attention for his passionate, no-nonsense approach to pro-life activism. Peter Krump, a young father of four children who made a living as a carpenter, had made the trip with us, as had the quiet and reserved Jerry McCarthy. Tim Murphy, clever, quick-witted, and rough around the edges, was there that night, and so was Andy Scholberg, the soft-spoken intellectual. Rudi, who worked at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s medical center, was the pathologist in our company. He had many years of experience handling the bodies of aborted and miscarried fetal children, and helped us verify the gestational age of the fetal remains. And then there was me—Monica Migliorino, thirty-four years old, a graduate student, active in the pro-life movement since 1976.

This was the first time I had ever seen the remains of aborted babies. As he examined each of the forty-three bags in turn, Rudi concluded that most of the fetal children were between six and fourteen weeks. Despite the small size of the remains, the tiny hands, feet, ribs, eyes floating free of their sockets, and sometimes even an intact face were plainly visible through the plastic windows of the specimen bags. The body parts loomed up through their murky world of formalin and blood like the inky prophecies of a Magic 8 Ball.

At the very bottom of the box lay an oblong plastic bag, much larger and heavier than the others. I picked it up and held it in my hands to examine it. The bag was stuffed with an unrecognizable material, and the weight of the oddly-shaped parcel made me apprehensive. I turned it over and over in my hands, staring at it, trying to make sense of it. At last my eyes recognized a shape crammed tightly against the plastic. It jumped out at me—an arm, disconnected from anything else that would have helped me see it for what it was. And then my eyes distinguished another arm, and then a severed foot, a full inch in length.

I had been staring at arms but did not see arms. I had no prior context by which my brain could recognize them. They were the dismembered limbs of a completely torn and mutilated body and, up until that day, my eyes had never been confronted with such a reality. It was as if an alien word had been spoken, a word I could not at first fully understand until finally, after much straining, I at last comprehended the message. Someone was trying to speak to me in the silent shocking word of his broken body.

We took the remains out of the bag, separated the limbs that had become enmeshed in the placenta, and assembled the body parts. The child, a boy, was at least six months gestational age, perhaps older. He had been aborted by the dilation and evacuation, or D&E, method. His body was well-formed, and his red and purple veins were visible through his translucent skin. I began to imagine how Regaldo S. Florendo, the clinic's owner and abortionist, had seen every part of this fetal child's body as he removed him from the womb limb by limb. It seemed as though the clinic wanted to hide this child as he was placed on the bottom of the box, buried beneath others who shared a similar fate. And, unlike his brothers and sisters, not a single piece of identifying information was scribbled on his plastic shroud. His identity, as well as his body, had been effectively concealed. Perhaps Florendo had blundered somehow in the performance of this late-term abortion and, in panic, felt as though he needed to cover it up. Maybe he miscalculated the unborn child's stage of development, started the abortion, and once begun, believed he had no choice but to see the gristly deed completed.

Joe Scheidler was with us in his garage when the shattered remnants of this child were brought to light. Andy Scholberg, who worked for Joe at the Pro-Life Action League, began the process of photographing the body, arranging the torn limbs into a hideous parody of a living baby. Joe stared, transfixed, then said tightly, “I can’t look at him anymore.” He turned around and went back into the house.

This was not the first night we had retrieved the bodies of aborted children from the garbage dumpster behind the Michigan Avenue Medical Center, and it would not be the last. The retrieval efforts began February 28, 1987, and lasted until April 25. Tim Murphy was responsible for organizing the late-night runs to the alley. In those two months we recovered about six hundred bodies, packed tightly into their cardboard coffins like the ones we had first discovered. Some nights, sometimes twice in a week, Tim went to the alley alone and emerged with a single silver-ducted taped box.

Joe Scheidler found out about the dumpster babies in a most unexpected way. Cas Bogdon, an advertising agent for the abortion clinic who designed its advertisements for the Chicago Yellow Pages, had a falling-out with the clinic management. But Cas knew a secret. He knew that the clinic disposed of the aborted babies in the dumpster behind the building. The disgruntled Cas took his news to Tom Bresler. Tom, a very outgoing, friendly man, a Catholic convert and an ordained deacon, had opened a crisis pregnancy center at 18 South Michigan Avenue, just a few doors north of Florendo’s clinic. Bogdon thought pro-lifers might wish to retrieve fetal remains and do some advertising of their own—advertising that would bring negative publicity to the clinic. Tom Bresler made some calls, and a meeting was arranged. Bogdan told Joe Scheidler and Tim Murphy where the bodies could be found.

I was living in Milwaukee when we first discovered the bodies of the aborted in the 30 South Michigan dumpster, but I had lived in Chicago for eight years before moving to Wisconsin in August of 1985 to pursue a Ph.D. in Theology at Marquette University. I still had many close friends in the Windy City, including Joe Schiedler and others in pro-life circles. While a graduate student at Loyola, I spent countless hours standing in front of the building that housed the Michigan Avenue Medical Center to try to talk women out of abortion—a practice commonly referred to as “sidewalk counseling.” Jerry McCarthy was the one who informed me of the discovery of the fetal remains and I decided to join my friends in the Chicago retrievals. Week after week I made the trek from Milwaukee to the alley off Monroe Street to find, in the dead of night, the bodies of aborted babies. My good friend Edmund, a graduate student in English at Marquette, often accompanied me as we sped along Interstate 94, headed south in his 1973 cream-colored Super Beetle.

I was living an unusual life, digging through trash dumpsters on a Chicago loading dock and picking the bodies of human beings out of the trash. I kept boxes of aborted children, draped with a rosary, in my closet. Edmund and I spent hours painstakingly photographing the broken tiny corpses. We rented equipment and set up a makeshift photography studio, sometimes in his apartment, sometimes in mine. We knew this was a rare opportunity. We had the remains of the aborted unborn in our own hands and felt it was vital to make a record of legalized abortion. My mind became forever etched with the memory of hundreds of dismembered, broken bodies—their blood, intestines, and torn skin.

I came to know some of those bodies very well in my attempts to get the photographs just right. I named some of the children. The child we found in the oblong bag in Joe Scheidler’s garage was named David. Another fetal child, whom I called “Baby Face” was a five-month-old who, from skin tones and facial features, appeared to be black. He or she was killed by the D&E method. But unlike most of the fetal children, the face of this baby was almost entirely intact. Although the baby’s lower jaw was gone, and one eyeball was missing from its socket, this was a beautiful, well-formed face.

Nearly as much as the sight of the bodies, the chemical smell of the formalin preservative solution remained in my memory. The aborted babies were packed in a twenty percent solution. The odor was sharp and penetrating; it made my eyes water and irritated my nostrils. Because I often had to be very close to the bodies to photograph them, the inside of my nostrils and sinuses soon became dry and burnt.

Tim Murphy, Peter Krump, Edmund Miller and I sometimes rendezvoused at nine or ten-o’clock on a Saturday night. We met at Blackie’s, a bar on the corner of Clark and Balboa at the south end of the Loop, popular with young singles. One Saturday night Edmund, Peter and I sat at a table at Blackie’s waiting for Tim Murphy to arrive. Earlier that week, Tim had again gone alone to the dumpster behind the Michigan Avenue Medical Center and retrieved another box of remains. Edmund and I intended to take the box of aborted babies back to Milwaukee and photograph them.

The bar was crowded. Loud music was playing, the heavy rock of the eighties. Tim finally walked into the bar carrying a large paper bag. It concealed the familiar smallish, duct-taped cardboard box. Rock singer Robert Palmer’s deep, raspy voice piped into the bar drowned out our conversation as Tim explained how he had found the box in the dumpster on Wednesday night. Tim set the paper bag on the table where we were seated. At first we were rather amused by Tim’s absolute brazenness. But soon we felt very ill at ease with a box of mutilated body parts sitting on a table in a hip singles bar. The bar was populated by young, attractive men and women, most of them professionals of one kind or another, talking, drinking beer, playing pinball, watching sports, and laughing together. In the midst of all this there was a box that contained a secret. The box enveloped a silent sorrow and as it lay on a table in this gay and noisy bar and no one knew it. The aborted unborn bore the weight of their hidden lives and their hidden deaths. I picked up the box and we all stood. Silently we processed in single file out of the bar and into the cool night air. The heavy door closed slowly behind us and the sounds of talk, laughter and music faded away.