Editor’s note: The following essay was first published as the introduction to ‘Uncertaine, ” a report by Americans United for Life. This is shown below with slight modifications.
Ia in the fall of 2019, the family of the late abortionist Ulrich George Klopfer made a horrific discovery. With the cleaning up of his home in Illinois after his death, they found that the remains of more than 2,200 unborn children were medically preserved – apparently victims of his decades-long career who performed tens of thousands of abortions, earning him a reputation as the most fertile abortion in Indiana. .
Later, they discovered a garbage can of 165 body parts hidden in the trunk of one of Klopfer’s cars. Despite a subsequent law enforcement investigation, we still do not know the abortionist’s motivation to retain these cruel trophies; whatever disturbed reasons he had for collecting it, went with him to the grave.
Perhaps even more striking than the lack of clarity about this horrific discovery was the relative lack of public curiosity about it. Klopfer’s stock of corpses received relatively little national attention immediately after local news broke the story, and the entire event passed in and out of the mainstream news in less than a week.
Apart from an opinion piece by columnist Ross Douthat, the New York Times published only one short report the day the news became known. In the ensuing week, some major news outlets presented one or two short articles outlining the basic facts of what happened, but the greatest interest and coverage came from local journalists. Nearly no reporters have asked politicians for comment on the issue, least of all Democrats supporting unrestricted legal abortions.
If the remains were in Klopfer’s possession of 2,411 human adults rather than unborn children, his grotesque horde would have enjoyed rapid national attention for months. We will discuss it today and remember him as the most notorious serial killer in American history. But because those corpses whose lives he had so cavalry destroyed were still children in the womb, most of us closed our eyes and turned away, preferring to pretend we had not seen them.
The natural unwillingness to wrestle with this kind of horrific incident is perhaps understandable. For a society that spends just as much time as we do to deal with the reality of abortion, it can be difficult to experience such an unadorned display of its destruction. But it is important to realize that an important part of our ignorance about Klopfer was the result of deliberate decisions by our mass media, and whose unwillingness to concentrate on the story did not surprise anyone who regularly follows our debates on abortion.
Even though Americans today are as divided on abortion policy as they were in 1973 when the Supreme Court ruled Roe against Wade, the most powerful voices in our increasingly influential mass media came down almost uniformly on the side of legal abortions. This leads to a skewed depiction of our abortion debate, and indeed of the facts that underlie our deep differences of opinion about abortion. If you want accurate, complete, unbiased information about abortion – even basic facts like when, where and how often it happens – mainstream media is the last place to look.
Experts and reporters often ignore the topic of abortion or offer only fleeting coverage, as with Klopfer’s storage of fetal remains. When they report on abortion at all, they omit essential facts, turn it to weigh heavier against the argument against abortion, or miss them wrong to make the case for legal abortion seem more favorable.
The American United for Life report, “Unsafe,” is a powerful antidote to the pervasive, media-induced ignorance. In the report you will find hard data that can be so difficult to trace – the kinds of facts that are crucial for informed, honest and clear eyes about the reality of abortion in our country.
As many as the seven judges of the Supreme Court who legalized abortion hoped that their ruling in Roe should the abortion debate be settled forever, this is clearly not the case. Nearly 50 years later, abortion remains as controversial as ever, arguably the most controversial issue in American political life. If we are ever to resolve this controversial battle, we must relentlessly pursue the facts so that we can honestly assess the consequences of legal abortion over the past decades. These facts and their dissemination are essential to finding ways to change our abortion policy and protect the least among us – not just the innocent unborn child, but her mother as well.
Let us return at this point to the story of George Klopfer, who really started earlier than 2019 when that fetal remains were found in his possession. The discovery was not the first time the abortion has attracted the attention of local authorities. In 2016, Indiana’s Medical Licensing Board suspended Klopfer’s license indefinitely after he found he violated state law and standard medical procedures while conducting three abortion cases in northern Indiana.
Among other offenses, Klopfer failed to file reports of terminated pregnancies with the state health department and the department of child services after performing abortions on at least two 13-year-old girls. He also admitted that he performed an abortion on a ten-year-old girl who was raped by her uncle, and he has never reported it to the state.
In the course of its operations, Klopfer failed to ensure that qualified staff were present when patients received or recovered before or after abortion procedures, and he provided proper information and counseling at least 18 hours before performing an abortion. provided to patients. , as required by state law.
Like the stories behind each statistic in ‘Uncertain’, the story of Klopfer’s career as a dirty and dangerous abortion received almost no national coverage. As a result, he received almost no public attention outside the local area – either before or after his family discovered all those body parts in his house. This persistent lack of attention illustrates the broader lack of public knowledge about the gruesome reality of abortion in our country.
Americans do not know about Klopfer because advocates of abortion and their allies in the media prefer to ignore or hide information that exposes the abortion industry. Most people do not seek facts about abortion because they would rather not think about it, because they do not know what to look for, or because they do not realize that they should seek it in the first place.
Far too many Americans do not know that abortion above and beyond the unborn human life is not safe for women. Most people do not realize that even suspected “sanitary” abortions pose serious risks to the physical and psychological health of pregnant mothers. In spite of RoeThe promise to bring abortion out of the back street and into the clean light of modern business, women still suffer from serious side effects and sometimes die as a result of abortion procedures – behind closed doors and away from the cover of our major. newspapers.
Those unpleasant, hidden realities explain why supporters of abortion are so reluctant to talk about men like Klopfer, his unsafe businesses, and his collection of fetal remains. Of course, most abortions do not collect the remains of the unborn children they killed, and store them in ladles and old Styrofoam coolers. Instead, they follow the general operating practice and throw away those bodies along with heaps of medical waste.
Is it really better?
We prefer to ignore abortions like Klopfer, because their stories force us to confront the cruel reality of abortion, to reckon with the fact that no matter how good or clean it may seem, every abortion ends with an empty uterus and the death of an unborn child.
It is the simple, awful fact that supporters of legal abortion are desperate to avoid. It is much easier to defend the right to abortion if it is covered with phrases such as ‘women’s healthcare’ or ‘the right to choose’. Recognizing that every abortion ends the life of a clear human being and defends it against the conditions is much more difficult and much less popular.
That is why it can be so difficult to find facts as in ‘Uncertain’. Therefore, most media will never discuss any story that shows how the abortion industry benefits from the murder of the unborn and the victim of their mothers. Therefore, Klopfer’s victims were buried by the state of Indiana in a mass grave with barely more than a local news report to celebrate the occasion.
Like the story of Klopfer, of the women who were abused in his businesses, of the unborn children whose bodies he stored and those he simply threw away, the realities in ‘Unsure’ are hard to face. But we can not close our eyes to it. We cannot allow ourselves to forget what we have seen.
We can not tell ourselves that George Klopfer’s businesses were a deviation, that most abortions are sterile and sanitary and safe for pregnant mothers – not if the statistics tell a different story. We cannot avoid the thousands of tiny corpses that are put behind businesses every day forever. “Unsafe” provides a glimpse of the truth for anyone willing to look into it. Let us confront without alleviating the damage that abortion has done in our country, and let us have the courage to do what we can to end it.