High School Student Speaks out on abortion debate

Denver, Colo., Feb 1, 2005 / 22:00 pm

Michelle Bauman, a 15-year-old sophomore at Bishop Machebeuf High School in Denver recently added her voice to those surrounding a debate over a Boulder parish and its burial of almost 500 aborted babies last month.

Bauman wrote a brief paper for her honors English class in response to an article she read in the Denver Post, which discussed the uproar surrounding the burial, something that has thrust the abortion debate into the public spotlight in the Denver area media.

Sacred Heart of Mary had been burying the cremated remains of babies from the Boulder Abortion Clinic, the first free-standing, legal abortion clinic in the country, quietly for years before the church went public in January. The remains came from a local mortuary who receives them from the abortion clinic.

Bauman’s paper responds to the pro-abortion uproar stemming from the incident and attempts to highlight the clear flaws in the arguments.

She poses the question, “If a fetus is simply a mass of tissue, as abortionists claim, why do abortion clinics give these aborted fetuses to mortuaries?”

Bauman continued, “When a person has their appendix, their tonsils, or a tumor removed from their body, it is either sent to a lab for examination or disposed of according to the guidelines of medical waste…The very fact that these fetuses were even at a mortuary suggests that the fetuses are human people.”

She goes on to point out that Dr. Warren Hern, who runs the Boulder Abortion Clinic cited Sacred Heart’s burial as a “macabre death ritual”, and talks about exploiting a “mother’s tragedy” suggesting that “death” refers to a human person, not a piece of tissue, and the term, “mothers” suggests that the remains were truly babies.

Bauman’s arguments echo much of the pro-life conversation stemming from Boulder recently. A state law maker remarked at the January burial that according to Colorado law, the abortion clinic would have to define the remains as human persons to be able to bring a legal suit against the parish.