Albin Rhomberg, the man who photographed the bodies of more than 16,000 preborn babies in a shipping container as a grad student in 1982, spoke with Live Action's Simeon Harris for an interview about the discovery.

Key Takeaways:

• In 1982, Rhomberg photographed the contents of a repossessed shipping container: the bodies of more than 16,000 preborn babies.

• Melvin Weisberg, the owner of a medical lab, had received the bodies of the aborted babies from abortionists in several states for storage, but had stopped making payments.

• The men who came to repossess the storage container were told it contained pool equipment, and were horrified when they saw what was truly inside.

• Rhomberg entered the the Los Angeles County coroner’s office to take photos of the babies, which were among the first to show the reality of late-term abortion.

The Details:

How He Found 16,000 Dead Babies In A Shipping Container

In an interview with Live Action, Rhomberg discussed the grisly discovery, which began with the men sent to Weisberg's property to repossess the shipping container.

"It was so heavy, it broke the winch," one man said at the time.

"We couldn't get it off the trailer, so we had to leave it on the trailer because it was too heavy," another man explained. So the men decided to empty the container to make it lighter, and saw the remains of thousands of aborted babies.

"I got a radio call from Ron Gillette, the foreman," a spokesperson said. "They said the men were throwing up and there was something really wrong."

"It was opened up and there it was," the second man said. "It was a mutilated body. And the more closer I looked at it, it was a human body."

After the bodies had been collected, they were taken to the Los Angeles County coroner's office, where Rhomberg photographed them. Those photographs provided evidence that the babies were victims of late-term abortions.

Rhomberg told Harris:

"You can see one of the hands has been torn off. Both of the legs have been twisted. You can see the muscle wound around until the legs were torn off. That type of procedure, they would tear the baby to pieces inside the mother's womb.

You can see they would grab the baby's feet here. See the marks, like a big pliers? There's forceps. And they would just twist and twist and twist and twist until the leg was twisted off and broken."

The procedure he is describing is a dilation and evacuation, or D&E, abortion. It is most often performed in the second trimester, and the abortionist literally rips the preborn baby apart, limb from torso.

Zoom In:

Harris questioned why Weisberg would have collected the bodies of thousands of preborn babies, and Rhomberg said he had a guess: to sell them.

"In some cases, some of the smaller ones, I think it was some idea he might want to sell them for specimens," he said. "You know, like people would want to have one. It was even some idea at that time that they would mount them in bookends, like a beetle or something embedded in like amber or plastic."

Rhomberg also explained how Weisberg was able to obtain the bodies:

"He was going around to these abortion clinics, collecting the bodies of the babies from the abortionist. And the way he made money is, he had himself registered as a laboratory. 

He was billing the government for supposedly doing pathological exams on the bodies and making reports. He sent these reports in, and he was getting hundreds of thousands of dollars of government payments."

Initially, after collecting the bodies and using them to make money, Weisberg would take them to an incinerator to dispose of. At some point, though, he began keeping them.

Pro-life Christians wanted to give the babies a proper burial, but the ACLU and the abortion industry fought back, arguing that it was just meaningless tissue, and should be cremated.

It sparked a two-year legal battle.

The incident and ensuing legal battle was so fierce that it even caught President Ronald Reagan's attention; Reagan, who had previously been pro-abortion, was extremely moved by Rhomberg's photos, and wrote a letter in support of the burial of the babies. He noted, "The terrible irony about this sudden discovery is not that so many human lives were legally aborted, but that they are only a tiny proportion of the 1.5 million preborn children quietly destroyed in our nation each year. This is the truth many would rather not face."

The Bottom Line:

Ultimately, the horrific discovery exposed the reality of what abortion truly is.

"I think everybody there realized this was wrong, that it was really wrong," one of the men who discovered the bodies said. "Everybody standing there felt that way. Even the coroner's office. I could sense that they were treating us like they were dead people. And they are dead people."