2,411 aborted babies buried, memorialized after shocking discovery at Ulrich Klopfer’s home

By Brandon Showalter, Opinion writer and social commentator Wednesday, February 12, 2020

The remains of 2,411 aborted babies were laid to rest at an Indiana cemetery Wednesday after being discovered by the family of abortionist Ulrich "George" Klopfer who died last September. 

“We have identified a burial site with the purpose to memorialize these 2,411 unborn, keeping them together in rest, each of them connected by their common fate," said Republican Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill at the graveside service at Southlawn Cemetery in South Bend. 

"Each of these 2,411 was a life — a life that was terminated — and each deserves to be secure in a final resting place, with dignity and respect, as should be afforded all human beings. May each of the 2,411 buried here, now and forever, rest in peace,” Hill added. 

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At the service that was streamed live by pro-life groups including the Susan B. Anthony List, clergy offered remarks decrying the evil of abortion and thanking God that the remains had a final resting place.

Mario Sims, senior pastor of Doulos Chapel in South Bend, urged Christians to continue to speak on behalf of the unborn.

"We are witnesses today of an American Holocaust. Two thousand four hundred-and-eleven children's lives that were given by God but snuffed out by the will of man. We, as followers of Jesus Christ, must stand strong. We must speak out. We must not be silenced. We must not be shouted down. We must not be told that we are politically incorrect," he said.

"These children's lives were taken after God gave them life. This must stop. As a pastor, I have never done a funeral for 2,411 human beings. But that is what we are doing here today. ... This is not a choice. This is murder."

Cathie Humbarger, head of Right to Life in northeast Indiana, told The Washington Post that she was "so grateful that, finally, the bodies of these little boys and girls will be treated with the dignity they deserved.” 

Klopfer performed tens of thousands of abortions in Illinois and Indiana. The abortion clinics he operated in South Bend, Gary, and Fort Wayne are now closed.

Authorities found 2,246 abortion babies remains in the garage of Klopfer's Illinois on Sept. 12, 2019. At the time, Will County Sheriff Mike Kelley said the remains recovered from Klopfer’s garage were found individually sealed in plastic bags and stored inside 70 cardboard boxes stacked from the floor to nearly reaching the height of the ceiling.

Each bag, he said, was filled with a preservative called Formalin. The bags were also labeled, but investigators did not reveal what was written on the labels, except to say the dates on them indicate the babies were aborted from 2000 to 2002. Klopfer’s clinics in South Bend, Fort Wayne and Gary, Indiana, were all operating at that time.

In October 2019, another 165 babies' remains were discovered inside the trunk of the abortionist's 1990s Mercedes Benz. Because of varying degrees of decay, the aborted babies could not be identified, investigators said at the time, though it's believed they were all aborted between 2000 and 2003.

Since the case garnered international attention, pro-life organizations have been calling on Congress to pass the Dignity for Aborted Children Act. The legislation would require abortion providers to have babies' remains buried or cremated instead of disposing of them as medical waste. 

"[T]he Klopfer case reinforces the importance of fetal burial laws; had these laws existed during Klopfer’s reign of terror, these aborted babies would have never ended up in a garage," Students for Life asserted in a Tuesday blog post.

Shortly after the remains were discovered, the group participated in a prayer vigil outside the coroner's office in Will County, Illinois, where they were initially stored.

As The Christian Post reported in September, during Klopfer's hearing with the Indiana Medical Licensing Board in August 2016, he recounted his experience of performing an abortion on a 10-year-old girl at a hospital in Chicago, Illinois.

The young girl had been raped by her uncle and the parents refused to press charges against him. The abortionist chose not to report the crime to police.

The Hoosier state now has some of the nation's most pro-life laws. In 2016, before he was elected vice president, then-Gov. Mike Pence signed a bill into law mandating the burial or cremation of babies' remains after an abortion. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the state law following court challenges.

The discovery of the babies' remains inside Klopfer's garage last September reminded many of the case of Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell, whose story has since been retold in several documentaries and in the motion picture "Gosnell."

The  abortionist is serving three life sentences without the possibility of parole at the Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution in Huntingdon after being convicted of murdering three infants who were born alive during abortions and of involuntary manslaughter of one woman, Karnamaya Mongar, a Bhutanese refugee, who died during an abortion procedure.