Five aborted children found in the American capital: innocent blood cries out

Four years ago, in the American capital, the remains of five children, victims of late-term abortions, were discovered. Today, nearly sixty legislators are asking the federal authorities to open an investigation into the circumstances of their death. Five little bodies, long kept in the shadows, of whom it is at last demanded that it be told how they perished.

The law of God knows here no ambiguity. « The innocent and just person thou shalt not put to death », says Scripture ; and of the child hidden in the womb the Lord declares : « Before I formed thee in the bowels of thy mother, I knew thee. » The unborn child is not a thing, nor a part of its mother's body : it is a person, known and willed by God from the first instant. This is why tradition has always ranked abortion among the crimes that cry for vengeance, and the Magisterium has condemned it in terms beyond appeal as the murder of an innocent.

Measured against this rule, the news is first of all a mourning. We do not judge souls ; we name the act : to put five children to death before their birth is a homicide, and then to cast their bodies aside like refuse adds outrage to the crime, for even the dead have a right to respect and to burial. That an investigation should at last be demanded, after four years of silence, says enough of how the public conscience struggles to name what it sees. We name it : these are children, not waste ; and their blood, like that of Abel, cries from the earth to Heaven. May they receive at last the one thing that men can still give them : the truth about their death, and a grave.

Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the fifth commandment ; Pius XI, encyclical letter Casti Connubii (1930), on the condemnation of abortion ; Book of Jeremias, I, 5 ; Exodus, XXIII, 7 ; Genesis, IV, 10.