Baptizing Aborted Babies: Part 1
If they aren't human beings, why do women want to baptize them?
Secular Pro-Life shared the following screenshot from Shout Your Abortion on their Twitter recently. It’s from a woman who is considering an abortion, and seems to have made up her mind to go through with it:
This woman clearly believes that she is pregnant with a baby, not tissue or a collection of cells.
This is not an isolated incident—many who counsel those considering abortion have run across pregnant people who believe their child is a baby but still want to abort.
To me, this doesn't show that these pregnant people are heartless, but illustrates just how desperate they are.
But the Twitter post made me recall something that I've uncovered in my research that surprised me. This is the fact that some people who have abortions want to have their aborted babies baptized.
Abortionist Proposes “Schools of Theology” to Honor Aborted Babies
In an article in Newsweek, late-term abortionist Curtis Boyd discussed his religious beliefs.
Boyd is known for admitting that when he commits an abortion, he is killing. He says, as you can see in the video below, "Am I killing? Yes, I am. I know that."
The Newsweek article says:
Religious abortion doctors want more support from their clergy. Dr. Boyd is often asked by Native American women to bless the aborted fetus and by Roman Catholic women to baptize it. He proposes that schools of theology develop special ceremonies and prayers to mark the loss [of the baby].3
He is not the only abortion provider to talk about baptizing aborted babies.
Nurse Baptizes Aborted Babies on Request
Pro-choice author Magda Denes's book In Necessity and Sorrow: Life and Death in an Abortion Hospital is a damning indictment of abortion. The book was written in the 1970s. Denes interviewed workers in an abortion facility and wrote about her observations.
The book is graphic, disturbing, and even more significant because an abortion supporter wrote it. Denes, herself a survivor of the Holocaust, admits that abortion is murder but still believes it's necessary.
I wrote an article featuring some quotes from the book.
Denes quotes the director of nursing at the abortion facility:
[W]hen it's a big fetus, you will hear them asking a lot of questions: 'Is it a boy or is it a girl?', 'Will it be baptized?'
We've had many requests for that too. We do it, it doesn't mean a thing. But if it rests somebody's peace of mind, you baptize a fetus. I mean for the psychological effect.
It's not recognized by the church; how can you murder a fetus and then baptize it? I feel if it makes the woman happy, why not? If it satisfies her psychological hangup, whatever it is.4
The nurse uses the word "murder." She has no illusions about what she's doing—and neither do the women having abortions who asked to have their babies baptized.
Abortion Worker With “Empathy” Baptizes Aborted Children
Another example comes from the book Whose Life? A Balanced, Comprehensive View of Abortion from its Historical Content to the Current Debate. Author Catherine Whitney interviews abortion clinic nurse Nan Patton Harrison, who considers herself a very compassionate person, discussing how some women ask her to baptize their babies after their abortions.
She says, "Perhaps it was because of my empathy that they always asked me to do the baptism."5
Harrison relates the difficulty of finding a small aborted baby's body among the remains of the uterine lining and the placenta removed by a suction machine. She then describes one "baptism" and says, "After I baptized the fetus, I flushed it down the hopper."6
An Abortion Clinic Treats Aborted Babies “Respectfully”
Another example can be found in the blog Abortion Clinic Days in a post from 2005.
The blogger, an abortion worker, is complaining about how pro-lifers are trying to pass laws regarding the disposal of the bodies of aborted babies.
She says, "There are very strict guidelines about how all human tissue is handled, and medical waste is a very well regulated [sic] business, the Sopranos notwithstanding. It is ultimately buried or burned."
She then accuses pro-lifers of disrespecting the bodies of aborted children:
[T]his moral outrage comes from the people who have literally stolen fetuses from pathology labs, clinics, etc. and paraded them around in shoe boxes, pawed through them on video, and generally exploited—not respected—fetuses.
In contrast to the awful, disrespectful pro-lifers, her facility, she says, treats aborted babies with respect—after they kill them, of course:
In my clinic, we wash off the tissue and examine it. It is treated respectfully and put with the woman's first name into a container. We show it to patients if they ask to see it.
She then says:
People have been known to pray over it, write notes for inclusion, "baptize" it, etc etc. Some clinic staff have also been known to say a little prayer over it—thanking it for its sacrifice so that the woman could continue on the path she was on.
So the abortion workers sometimes pray over the bodies of the babies they just killed, and their mothers also pray and baptize their children.
They Believe the Baby is a Person
All this, of course, contrasts with the commonly held belief that all pro-choice activists and abortion providers believe that a preborn baby isn't a human being.
I have written a short book giving examples of pro-abortion activists and leaders, including one former president of Planned Parenthood, openly admitting that abortion kills human beings.
You can download it for free here.
Footnotes
1."Abortion And the Fight for God" Newsweek October 17, 1994.
2. Magda Denes, PhD. In Necessity and Sorrow: Life and Death in an Abortion Hospital (New York: Basic Books, 1976) 152—15.
3. Catherine Whitney Whose Life? A Balanced, Comprehensive View of Abortion from its Historical Content to the Current Debate (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1991) 205.
4. Ibid.