Former Planned Parenthood worker Ava Torre-Bueno wrote about an experience she had while working as director of counseling in a Planned Parenthood abortion facility. Previous Live Action News articles have shown that “counseling” at Planned Parenthood often amounts to little more than a sales pitch. In fact, many former workers have verified this.
Torre-Bueno describes an incident where abortion facility staff knocked on her office door and told her a patient about to have an abortion wanted to take the baby’s remains home with her. The abortion facility workers had never encountered this before and were not sure how to respond.
Torre–Bueno talked to the woman, whose name was Jill. Apparently, four years earlier, Jill had a previous abortion at the facility. On that occasion, she took her aborted baby home and buried her child’s body in the woods.
Torre–Bueno writes:
[J]ill had been given the fetus at her request and had gone with her boyfriend to the mountains and buried it under a beautiful tall tree. This helped her say goodbye to the baby and let her feel she had done the best she could spiritually in relation to the child she wanted but could not have at that time. She was in the same situation again and wanted to perform the same ritual to soften the guilt she felt for not using contraception perfectly and having to take her baby’s life. It was a powerful way for her to take care of the baby’s spirit and give it peace and beauty to dwell in forever.
Torre-Bueno further explains:
Jill wasn’t religious in the standard sense of the word. She didn’t identify with any of the major religions although she had probably been raised in a nominally Christian home. She was someone whose spiritual sense of herself was found in nature, and in being part of a bigger “whole.” Burying the fetus was a way to help her baby be part of the “whole” again.
READ: Indiana diocese offers to bury remains of 2,000 babies found in abortionist’s home
This time, the abortion facility couldn’t give Jill her baby’s body due to new regulations about “bodily fluids.” In the eyes of the law, Jill’s baby had been reduced to medical waste, and the abortion facility could not release the body. Instead, Torre-Bueno brought the aborted baby to Jill and allowed her to spend time with her dead child. Jill was also offered the chance to send her baby’s remains to a local mortuary, which could then legally give them to her. Torre-Bueno did not say whether Jill chose this option.
One of the striking things about this story is how it contrasts with common pro-abortion rhetoric. Pro-choicers claim (and abortion facilities advertise) that preborn babies are nothing more than tissue, insignificant collections of cells that can be removed to improve women’s lives. Having an abortion, some politicians and pro-choicers argue, is no different from having wisdom teeth removed. Why then, would a woman having an abortion feel she needed to bury her baby’s body? No one feels the need to “say goodbye” to a removed appendix or tumor. It would be ridiculous to do so.
When Jill buried her child in what she considered a ritual, she was acknowledging her baby’s humanity. Tragically, this knowledge did not prevent her from having at least two abortions.
Incidentally, although several times in her book Torre-Bueno refers to preborn children as “products of conception,” she has no problem using the word “baby” in this context.
Source: Ava Torre-Bueno Peace after Abortion (San Diego, California: Pimpernel Press, 1997) 38 – 39
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