Birth of a Pro-Life Crusader

Dead babies in a garbage can.

Parents, do you want your children to grow up pro-life? Show them this picture.

A recent discussion here in the blog led me to Google up this photograph and post some personal recollections about it.

Being shown this photograph (or one very similar to it) was my first exposure to abortion. In 1975, I was the fifth grade class representative in the student council at St. John the Evangelist Elementary School, when Matt Luttig, the president of the student body, brought this photograph to a council meeting with a proposal to draft letters to our politicians to petition them to pass a law to make this illegal. I cried for these beautiful babies, unwanted, murdered, and thrown out in a garbage can.

We got to work on the letters to be voted on the following meeting. Within days, the student president addressed the entire student body, presenting them the photograph and the letters we would send out. Another day, some class time was bumped for a couple of women from a Right to Life group to show us lifelike fetal models and let us pass them around and hold them. They gave us kids color brochures with photos of unborn babies at various stages, some in the womb and some aborted.

We sent the letters out to our representatives in government, though I don't remember exactly whom, except one: Senator Charles Percy (RINO, IL). He wrote back some gobbledegook that left me confused when School President Matt read it back to us. It began with some patronizing congratulatory opening about how proud he was of students like us for having put words to paper that got all the way to his desk in Washington, and for expressing concerns over important issues that face our nation and thanked us for the picture we sent. That gave us a swell feeling as Matt read on. Percy concluded with something about his support for the right to choose. Right to choose what? He didn't say before he signed off. I found that very confusing, never having heard of "abortion" called a "right to choose".

Of course, I now understand that the euphemism serves the purpose for those who favor abortion not to have to say it by name. With added life experience, I also sympathize to a small degree with Percy's position, seeing that after having suffered the trauma of getting his can kicked around the block as a kid for being named "Percy", he had to find someone weaker down the chain to dish it out on.

That rejection letter was a jolt. Here, someone with power acknowledged having held this self-same image of dead babies in a garbage can that so moved every student and teacher in the school, and he wrote back that he was in favor of it. There would be much more work to do. I'm still working on it.