My veteran readers know that I’ve been expressing concern concern what Father Frank Pavone and his organization, Priests for Life, does with the corpses of aborted fetuses in his possession for many years now.
I’m not a journalist or an investigative reporter; I’m just a Catholic who has always been told that people are worthy of reverence from conception until natural death. My heart is broken for what looks to be gross mistreatment of those bodies with no consequences. This is especially concerning to me because one of the reasons why Pavone receives donations from Catholics all over the world is because he is said to perform the Work of Mercy of burying the dead. People give aborted babies to Priests for Life, and Pavone gives them the dignified Christian burial they were denied– at least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.
It has been suggested to me multiple times that Pavone has actually been hoarding the same corpse or few corpses for years or decades; I’ve tried to establish a timeline for the bodies he uses in videos and on his show funerals at least twice. This week a reader has sent me additional and extremely disturbing information, with photographic and video evidence. It has led me to believe that Priests for Life has two babies that died in 1978, which may not have ever received burial in the past 41 years.
I am summarizing the information here: another attempt to trace a timeline of the public appearances of what appear to be two human fetuses, between fifteen and twenty weeks old at the time of their death, who have not been given a proper burial but have been used as political props for four decades.
I’m going to link to the sources of this information rather than putting photos in this post most of the time, because I don’t want to show disturbing photos of dead bodies on Patheos. I don’t even want to talk about this at all, but I feel somebody needs to draw attention to how these infants’ corpses are being treated. If these websites are altered or taken down, I have screenshots and a downloaded video. I’m going to describe them pretty thoroughly, so this post is going to be long and comes with an obvious content warning.
The first piece of information I have is a series of photos of aborted babies in and around a casket from 1978, which are published on Priests for Life’s own website.
We see a blond wood casket with “Baby Choice, 1978, age 13-15 weeks, Cause of Death: Salt Poisoning” on a brass plate. I assume “salt poisoning” means poisoning from a saline abortion, where saline is injected into the uterus, causing burns and death. The lining of the casket is purple satin and velvet. We also see two dead children of about the fetal age mentioned on the brass plate; they may be as old as 20 weeks based on their size. There are three pages of photos there with close-ups of the various body parts, using coins and adult hands for size reference. If you look at them, do note the close-ups of the heads and feet; those will be important later. The larger one is completely gray-black, presumably from the saline, except for her head, feet, groin, and part of the left leg. You can see a bit of the vulva at one angle which is why I’m calling her “her” from now on. The other is completely black except for the buttocks and a bit under the arms– they show the baby flipped both ways so you can see both arms have the same bare patch at the shoulder and underarm. I cannot tell if the one with the completely black head is a boy or a girl. Since the coffin plate says “saline,” I’ll keep assuming that these black markings are saline burns. May God have mercy on us, it’s a traumatic sight.
Pavone has said “It is not often that we have the bodies of aborted babies. Unfortunately, the act by which their lives are dishonored and their bodies dismembered takes those bodies and discards the with the medical waste.” So by his own admission, whole bodies of aborted children well-preserved enough to display would be an extremely rare thing for him to have several of. When we take into account that saline abortions comprised only 1.75% of abortions by 1985 and the number has been dropping ever since, and that most victims of saline abortion are dismembered before being removed from their mothers’ bodies, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the chances of him having several pairs of saline-aborted babies the same age, sex, race and with the identical burns in the exact same places on the body are nil.
28 years later in 2006, Pavone was touring the country with a female fetus named Rebecca which was said to be “anonymously donated to a pro-life activist in Washington DC about a year ago” for show funerals. The next year he did it again, and claimed it was a fetus aborted at about eighteen weeks. Pavone claimed at the time that he was going to bury the fetus after the demonstrations. I don’t have a photo of those funerals, but we have a description of a fetus that was whole and on display, with “fingers and toes,” being taken in and out of embalming fluid, and she was about the same age as the female one from 1978– or as both of them if they’re both female.
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