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Friday, October 7, 2005
THE LARGEST MASS GRAVE IN AMERICA?
By Rich Buhler
Special to ASSIST News Service
LOS ANGELES (ANS) -- Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the sealing of what many regard to be the largest mass grave on American soil. (Pictured: Rich Buhler).
There isn’t anything that points you to the site in the Odd Fellows cemetery in East Los Angeles. You have to search for it, but it’s there on the east side of the grounds marked only by a flat gravestone that says “IN MEMORY OF THE 16,500 PRECIOUS UNBORN BURIED HERE. OCT 6, 1985.”
The story that led to the burial came to light in February of 1982 when workers opened a large shipping container that had been repossessed from the owner of a medical lab in Southern California. It was filled with buckets of the results of thousands of abortions.
Los Angeles county supervisors faced a dilemma about what to do with the remains and a feminist lawsuit that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court ordered that they couldn’t be buried with religious ceremony because that would be taking sides in the abortion debate.
But on October 6, 1985, the date of the burial, there was a crowd of us who had independently come to do what the county could not do: honor the lives and mourn the deaths of the children being laid to rest.
I had the privilege of being one of those who participated in the service that day and it was an overwhelming experience as we stood at the graveside of thousands of children who by that time would have been three years old and playing in the Southern California sunshine.
During the ceremony, County Supervisor Michael Antonovich read a telegram from President Reagan. In it Mr. Reagan likened the Supreme Court decisions legalizing abortion to decisions that upheld slavery prior to the Civil War. He said, “Once again a whole category of human beings has been ruled outside the protection of the law by a court ruling which clashed with our deepest moral convictions."
That telegram got fresh national attention during the confirmation debate around John Roberts’ nomination to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. As associate White House counsel in 1985 he was asked to review the text of President Reagan’s statement.
For several years, the grave of the babies was unmarked because of conflict over what to say on a gravestone. I had the privilege of again being a part of the service that later dedicated the memorial marker.
In my remarks I speculated what the demographics might be of the children buried there. If they were representative of the nation as a whole, about 8,000 of them were boys and 9,000 were girls. Had they lived, 1,600 of them would have been left handed, nearly 4,000 of them Catholic, 2,300 Baptists, and more than 160 Episcopalians.
About 1,600 would have become teachers, more than 13,000 high school graduates and more than 3,500 college grads. Nearly 2,000 would have been executives, 1,600 in sales, and a little more than 2,000 would have been professionals.
These are woefully unscientific numbers, but illustrate the fact that these children were not the medical equivalent of amputated limbs or surgically discarded cartilage. Until abortion intervened, every one of them was alive in safety of their mother’s wombs and had beating hearts. Some of them were old enough that you could have seen whether they had grandpa’s dimple or momma’s nose. Where the comparison with the national population breaks down the most is with race. Because of the locations of the clinics where their abortions took place a disproportionate number of the children were minorities.
Yesterday, I paused to think about the children buried in the Odd Fellows cemetery. I try to drop by and visit their grave whenever I can. Not only to remember them but the more than 100 million other babies who like them have been the deprived of the opportunity to experience birth and life but who unlike them do not have a grave.
Rich Buhler is an author, speaker, broadcaster, and founder of TruthOrFiction.com.
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