Why would anyone leave a baby casket filled with the organs of a small child on the street?

Maybe more to the point, why does this horrify us?

That second question might seem needless. Of course it is upsetting to think of the organs of someone’s baby lying in a box on a public street.

Our natural, God-given sense of decency and compassion is repulsed by this. We all know that a little baby, even in death, is precious. Her remains are not like the wrapper on a burger, something to be discarded without a second thought.

She was a person, a human being, an image-bearer of the God of the universe. And she had parents who, it can be hoped, cared about her. They would be pained to know the fate of their child’s body.

We readily harden ourselves when the pain is too great or when we fear our consciences will be too roiled.

We all know these things and feel the grief and disgust they bring. The moral requirements of God’s law are “written” on our hearts (Romans 2:15). This moral “writing” is imprinted on our souls. It cannot be erased. Our conscience is entwined with our souls, our minds, and our hearts.

But it can be covered-over. The conscience can be “seared as with a hot iron” (I Timothy 4:2).

Babies in the Sewer System

We are sickened by the remains of a baby lying on a street. The little coffin was found protruding from a black plastic bag. The very image tears at our hearts.

Yet every day, the remains of about 2,700 unborn children are disposed of without ceremony throughout our country.

Former Des Moines Planned Parenthood clinic manager Sue Thayer offers a chilling account of what happens to the bodies of aborted children. “I just remember standing there thinking, ‘All those babies are in the Des Moines sewer system’,” she reports. Thayer says that “other babies were placed into ‘little red bags with a twist tie’ and put in the freezer.”

In 2015, Melissa Farrell, Planned Parenthood – Gulf Coast’s director of research, explained what happens next:

After the physician has confirmed the tissue correlates with gestational age, tissue is placed in a biohazard container and gets discarded into a single container and then is placed in the freezer. Anything after 16 weeks is immediately placed in the freezer after the procedure. And it is all sent away once a week for incineration.

It is interesting that the baby casket was found in Philly. “At one Planned Parenthood” in Philadelphia, “state inspectors found used biohazard containers sitting in a janitor’s closet,” a 2015 report states. “At (a) second Planned Parenthood, babies’ body parts were found rotting in bags.”

We Harden Ourselves to Escape Reality

In Ohio, Attorney General Mike DeWine announced in December 2015 that “aborted fetuses from Planned Parenthood facilities are ultimately disposed of in landfill sites.”

Attorney Kristi Burton Brown of the Charlotte Lozier Institute summarizes the gruesomeness of what occurs:

In a number of states, the laws are so broad that it is legal to grind the bodies of aborted babies in the garbage disposal and send the remains through the sewage system or to incinerate entire containers of baby body parts at once.

It is interesting that women who abort their babies don’t want to know what happens to the remains. In a major survey published in 2014, researchers found that “ceremonial disposal was approved of following the loss of a wanted pregnancy but not following elective abortion. Most wanted the opportunity to access information about disposal but did not favor being asked or required to make decisions about disposal.”

This is typical of human nature. We shut-off emotions too difficult. We readily harden ourselves when the pain is too great or when we fear our consciences will be too roiled.

Human Dignity is Not Objective

In doing this with respect to abortion, we make a clear decision. The dignity and value of the unborn child are not objective. They depend on how we feel about the child.

This is a lie, a satanic deception augmented by our own eagerness not to have to deal with hard truths. Of course the child has objective value. Her place of residence, whether inside the womb or outside of it, does not define her worth.

When confronted by the gruesome scene of the remains of a baby left on the street, we recoil. That’s natural. It’s also why we are uninterested in finding out what happens to the dismembered bodies of “unwanted” unborn little ones. Confronting the reality of their humanness, their suffering, the cruelty we have allowed to be inflicted upon them is too disconcerting.

I don’t think it does much good for the pro-life community to display, on placards or at information tables, photos of aborted infants. People are angered by being forced to look at these photos. Should they be much more angered that such actions take place? Of course! But human nature is inclined to get angrier at those forcing them to consider things they’d rather not think about.

How to Pro-Lifers Can Persuade

If persuasion is our goal, we need to take several different tacks. One of them is using ultrasound technology. Showing women what their babies look like often has a profound affect. Seeing the living person within her arrests the heart and mind. The conscience often wins.

Another is asking questions, especially of policymakers. The pro-life community should never be defensive. Ours is the side of compassion for the unborn and their mothers, both victims of the predatory abortion industry.

We need to turn the tables. If a hostile interviewer implies we don’t care about women, we need to say that care for women means helping them through difficulty, not destroying another human life.

If the interviewer asks about our views of women’s rights, we need to affirm the most essential right — the right to life. And ask why the interviewer thinks abortion is the first and only recourse for any woman.

And we need to come right back, respectfully but without apology, at the advocates of death. Ask him if he believes there should be any restrictions on abortion at any point in pregnancy. If so, why and when? Does the unborn child have any value apart from the will of his mother?

Ask the interviewer if he will ask these hard questions of a “pro-choice” politician or advocate. And hold him or her to it.

“If the unborn (child) is not a human person, no justification for abortion is necessary,” writes Christian philosopher Greg Koukl in his book, Precious Unborn Human Persons. “However, if the unborn is a human person, no justification is adequate.”

The organs in the little casket, sitting on a sidewalk like a piece of debris, belonged to a baby. A person. Perhaps this time, the authorities in Philadelphia will have a spasm of conscience and treat the remains with the respect they deserve. And which, in our time, the remains of the “unwanted” unborn almost never get.