On May 25, 2016, a committee of the Ohio Senate approved legislation which would require all abortion facilities to treat the bodies of aborted babies humanely. Democrats joined Republicans in voting for the bill. LifeNews reports that “the bill requires that the remains of aborted children are given humane burial or cremation and increases informed consent by requiring full disclosure to women pursuing abortions of their options for the aborted baby’s treatment.”

Part of what prompted Republican Representative Kyle Koehler to sponsor the legislation, styled S.B. 254, was the exposes from the Center for Medical progress that aborted children were being dismembered and sold for their parts. Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine told a Cincinnati newspaper in 2015 that one company actually steam boils the bodies of aborted children before dumping them in a landfill, in order to “kill bacteria.”

As deeply disturbing as this is to even write about, it rips off the veneer of civility from evil organizations such as Planned Parenthood. They treat unborn children as trash. Or, in their favored euphemism, “medical waste.”

Two Stories

Let me share two stories.

First, in 1989 in Santa Ana, California, police offer Michael Buelna heard a sound coming from a trash bin. He discovered a newborn baby boy with his umbilical cord still attached.

The child was only four hours old. He weighed four pounds, two ounces. Michael saved the little boy from what would have been a certain death. His mother had dumped him in the trash.

In a 2015 interview for a local ABC News affiliate he recounted the experience. “He still had all the mucus and stuff, and all the trash and gravel was sticking to him. I tried to give him a tiny little bit of breath, and he reacted a little bit.” Robin Barton was 25 years old at the time of the interview. He had been raised by an adoptive family, and Officer Buelna got to meet him that year.

Second, in 2013 a newborn baby was found in a trash can in Jersey City. The child was left to die by a mother who did not want him or her. Fortunately, teenage boys hanging out behind the apartment building that Saturday afternoon heard the baby cry and saw a trash bag moving.

I asked a question back then which I repeat today: What is the difference between the babies found in the trash who survived the attempt to kill them and the babies found in the trash behind abortion facilities?

One very important thing: they were still alive because they were rescued. The babies found in the abortionist’s dumpster were beyond rescue, because they were dead.

Hidden From Our Eyes

Thousands of unborn children are killed every day in the United States, and their bodies are thrown into dumpsters as medical waste. The disposal of their little bodies is hidden from our eyes. We do not ever see what a real abortion really looks like.

When we read about people leaving their newborn children in the trash, we know it is wrong. Very few people would disagree. Almost everyone believes that child has a right to live. If he’s taken to the hospital, the hospital will do everything it can for him, even when no one will be paying for his care.  There’s also a great reaction in the press and on social media when one of these stories appears.

But far fewer see that the child whose body winds up in the Planned Parenthood dumpster had the same right to live. Somehow his being aborted makes many people think about him differently. He doesn’t have a right to live — even if he’s within minutes of being born.

Something’s very wrong here, when the humanity people recognize in one situation they deny in another. The only difference is that one mother went to an abortionist and the other didn’t. How does that give one the right to life but not another? It doesn’t, but, but the movement that opposes the right to life (they use the term “pro-choice”) believes that a child only becomes a person with the right to survive gestation when he’s “wanted.”

I hope the news out of Ohio — a state that’s twice gone for Obama — is a sign that more Americans are beginning to see the unborn child as a human being deserving of protection. Admitting that he deserves proper burial is a good first step.