By Cheryl Sullenger
Wills County, IL – By now, most people have heard of Indiana abortionist Ulrich Klopfer and his ungodly hoard of 2,246 “medically preserved” aborted babies found stored on his property in Illinois.
Klopfer was an unsavory character who operated three abortion facilities in Fort Wayne, Gary, and South Bend, Indiana, at the peak of his career. His clinics were repeatedly cited for failing to pass heath inspections. Klopfer’s Indiana medical license was suspended in 2016 for failing to report suspected child sex abuse on a 13-year old, but gave abortions to little girls as young as ten who were brought to him for abortions.
After his last abortion clinic closed in 2016, Klopfer apparently moved to an unincorporated area of Wills County, Illinois.
After his passing on September 3, his family was going through his belongings at his home when they discovered the aborted baby remains. The discovery was reported to the authorities and the remains were collected by the county coroner. An investigation is underway.
The Will County Sheriff’s Office has stated that there is no evidence that abortions were done on Klopfer’s property. No further statements will be made until the investigation is over.
Questions
For now, many questions remain unanswered.
Where did the aborted babies come from? What were their gestation ages? How long had they been there?
Some women who underwent abortions by Klopfer through the years are now agonizing over whether their babies’ remains are among those found.
But perhaps the most chilling question of all is “why?” Why did Klopfer keep those babies on his Illinois property?
While there are no answers to that question yet, we can take a look at why others involved with abortions have stockpiled aborted baby remains, to help us better understand the Klopfer case.
Too cheap to pay
In 1982, workers from a Los Angeles-area storage facility repossessed a rented storage container from a pathologist who had halted payment. To the horror of the storage facility employees, they found that it was filled with 16,433 bodies of aborted babies. The pathologist had accumulated the babies in the course of his business, but had not wanted the expense of hiring a medical waste disposal company to collect them for proper disposal.
After a huge three-year dispute within the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors over what should be done with the remains, which were now in the custody of the county coroner, the babies were finally placed into six adult-sized coffins and interred at Odd Fellows Cemetery in Los Angeles, California. In 2013, a grave stone was installed by pro-life groups at the gravesite that was etched with these words: “In Memory of the 16,500 Precious Unborn Buried Here. Oct 6, 1985.” I was fortunate enough to have attended both the burial and the gravestone dedication services.
To this day, this represents the largest mass grave on American soil.
Billing Dispute?
Kermit Gosnell was a West Philadelphia abortionist who flew under the radar for years as conditions and practices at his Women’s Medical Society deteriorated. I attended Gosnell’s criminal trial and heard the testimony against him first hand.
In the filthy and cluttered basement of Gosnell’s clinic, police discovered the remains of 47 aborted babies stored in a variety of containers, including milk jugs, cat food cans, and even a cherry lime-ade container. These babies were presumably too big to go down the garbage disposal or to be flushed down the toilet, as was the fate of other babies aborted by Gosnell and his unlicensed associates.
Gosnell had told investigators that he was involved in a billing dispute with his medical waste disposal company, but it was suspected that he had just stopped paying them.
Those babies were eventually buried by the City of Philadelphia in an unmarked grave at Laurel Hill Cemetery on September 12, 2013 – five months after Gosnell was convicted of three counts of first degree murder for severing the spinal cords of three viable babies that were born alive during his incompetent abortions. Unfortunately, the cemetery has so far refused to grant permission for the placement of a permanent gravestone at the burial site.
Didn’t want to get caught
Other abortionists have accumulated aborted baby remains because they were operating illegally and did not want to be found out. Such was the case with an abortion facility operated by New Jersey abortionist Steven Chase Brigham in Elkton, Maryland.
Brigham’s New Jersey clinics were not allowed to abort babies over 14 weeks gestation, but he was willing to break the law to collect the much higher fees for abortions in the second and even third trimester of pregnancy. He opened a clandestine abortion facility in Elkton, Maryland, even though he was not licensed in that state. He would start the women’s abortions in New Jersey, and induce their labors. He then escorted them in a caravan down to Elkton, where the abortions were completed.
Things went wrong for Brigham’s greedy scheme when one young woman nearly died from a severely botched abortion. With part of her bowel hanging from the birth canal, she was loaded into the back seat of Brigham’s rental car and taken to a local hospital. Horrified, the hospital staff called the police.
When the police raided Brigham’s secret abortion clinic, they found the frozen bodies of 34 late-term babies – some as old as 30 weeks gestation. On December 29, 2011, Brigham was arrested and charged in Cecil County, Maryland, with five counts of first-degree murder and five counts of second-degree murder related to the discovery, only to have those charges dropped when an expert witness withdrew from the case.
Those babies were given the dignity of a Christian burial on November 15, 2010, at Immaculate Conception Cemetery in Cherry Hill, Maryland.
Another example is that of an abortionist collecting aborted babies because he didn’t want to get caught committing crimes is that of Michigan abortionist Michael Roth, known as the “Trunk Abortionist.” He was arrested in June 2016, after police made the gruesome discovery of 15 aborted babies kept in Roth’s trunk during an investigation into a traffic accident.
The babies were the product of extremely dangerous surgical abortions secretly done in the homes of women by Roth using equipment and drugs he had stolen from an abortion facility where he worked. Roth eventually lost his medical license, was fined $25,000, and pleaded no contest to criminal charges. What does one get for larceny and committing illegal abortions? Roth was sentenced to serve just 18 months of probation.
The babies were buried in two religious ceremonies at Holy Sepulcher Cemetery in Southfield, Michigan in November 2018, due to the efforts of Citizens for a Pro-Life Society.
Something more sinister?
In addition to the 47 aborted babies discovered at Kermit Gosnell’s abortion facility, investigators made another discovery more macabre than the first. Some of the aborted babies were on display in jars. Other plastic specimen jars contained the severed feet of several large aborted babies displayed on a shelf.
Gosnell insisted that he kept the severed feet in the event DNA samples were ever needed, but expert witnesses who testified at his trial said they had never heard of such a thing. This was certainly not the way legitimate medical facilities collected tissue for DNA testing.
So why would anyone keep severed feet on display? The answer might be found in the psychology of serial killers. One website explained:
Experts say that these items can serve as grisly totems to help the killers relive their crimes later. Some take personal possessions like jewelry, IDs, or clothing — while others hoard body parts.
Serial killers from Jack the Ripper to Jeffrey Dahmer have been known to keep body parts of their victims. In Dahmer’s case, he soaked his victim’s bodies in vats of acid and kept the bones as souvenirs.
It could be possible that Gosnell, who was believed to have murdered hundreds of living, breathing infants that had survived abortions, possessed some of the psychological traits of a serial killer. He has never admitted that what he did was wrong in any way.
Is it possible that Ulrich Klopfer, who had committed thousands of abortions over decades of practice, also shared the traits of a serial killer that compelled him to keep trophies of their victims? Or was he engaged in criminal abortions and needed to hide the evidence? Perhaps he was just too cheap to pay a company for proper disposal.
Hopefully, the results of the Illinois investigation will provide answers and closure for the public and for the women who wonder if the remains of their own babies are among the Klopfer hoard.
