Remembering the Dead Gives Us Resolve to Fight For Life

Our staff at Survivors reflect upon the deaths of  

56 million children

since Roe v. Wade

and the value of honoring the dead

on this National Day of Remembrance for Victims of Abortion

C.J. Williams, Social Media Director:

We Survivors have a long history with Crestlawn Cemetery.  Besides being in our backyard, our founders had a part in burying the Chino Hills babies.  These 54 aborted babies were discovered in cardboard boxes at the edge of a field, dumped by the abortionist who had butchered them.  Not only were they killed, their deaths were unmourned, their lives ignored, the crime unpunished -- until they were found by two children, and given the respect of burial and remembrance by a coalition of local churches.

And we as Survivors have an intense connection to this resting place of our preborn peers who were murdered by abortion with our nation’s legal consent.  Some of our staff reflect on the impact of honoring these babies, murdered by legalized abortion.  The Chino Hills babies were dumped in a field in cardboard boxes.  It is in mourning and respecting these precious lives that our resolve burns to say, “No more!”

Ashley Baldwin, Communications Coordinator:

My morning commute to the Survivors Office a couple years ago was passing by the Crestlawn Memorial park, the graveyard where the "54 Chino babies" were laid to rest.  Before entering the freeway, just 500 yards down the road from the graveyard, I would take a minute to think about all of those children and their terrible death.

Those 54 babies were meant for so much more.  For life, to be a part of someone's family, to attend school and make friends, to someday become a wife or husband.  Instead they were tortured inside of their mommy's bellies, ripped limb from limb, suffered punctured holes to their skulls, thrown into a garbage bag, and then dumped on the side of the road.  As I mourned their loss, it gave me motivation to fight harder, to work longer hours, to get back up, and to push past every obstacle Satan threw our way in the pro-life movement, because all children deserve better than abortion.

Kristina Garza, Outreach Director:

I remember the day I heard that two little boys, not much younger than I was, found the boxes of dead babies near a freeway overpass.  I was 11 years old.  I did not know then what abortion was, but I knew that there was something strangely wrong with the whole story.

Last year, we ended Campus Outreach with a private team prayer at the gravesite of the 54 Chino Hills babies [link to story: http://lifeadvocate.org/11_98/cover_s.htm].  It was a somber time, but a reminder that our fight as anti-abortion activists is a daily struggle not just for an ideology, but for individual human beings, and that many babies will still die at the end of the day, with nobody to remember them or love them, with no graves or names, because, sadly, abortion is legal in our country.

As we approach the National Day of Remembrance for Aborted Children, and I help to arrange a memorial service this Saturday for the 54 Chino Hills babies, I am reminded constantly of that day, when the idea of abortion was introduced to me at 11 years old.  I think of the incredible mercy of our Lord, who gives me the opportunity to serve Him through one of the organizations who worked to give the babies a proper funeral.  And I pray for the day when abortion becomes a horrible part of our nation's history, because through our efforts, we will have abolished this heinous holocaust.