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Forty Years of Baby Choice: A Timeline

Forty Years of Baby Choice: A Timeline

Last updated on: October 3, 2019 at 3:38 pm by Mary Pezzulo

Forty Years of Baby Choice: A Timeline 2019-10-03T15:38:47-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

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Now, 30 years after 1978, a year after the last of those funerals I can find, a year after Pavone said the baby would be buried when the demonstrations were finished, in May of 2008, Pavone posted a video to Youtube to talk about prostaglandin abortions. I am linking to the video here, but I have a downloaded backup copy. Prostaglandin abortions are not saline abortions where saline is injected into the uterus to kill the baby and deliver them dead; these are abortions performed by induction of labor, and according to Pavone the baby is sometimes delivered live and dies after birth. As a visual aid, Pavone has a physician in yellow gloves, a Doctor Byron Callhoun, display two babies. One of them is completely black except for the well-developed head, groin, feet and one leg. The other is completely black except for the buttocks and little patches under the arms. They are identical in size and what we can see of the skin color to the babies posed with the coffin saying 1978. The burns are also, as far as I can tell, in exactly the same pattern. The babies are pulled out of what looks like a thermos of some kind of gooey fluid, and the doctor thrusts them at the camera to calmly explain the pattern of the bruising– he now says that the black marks are bruising and not saline burns. He says that the larger baby with the bare head is in much better shape than the other. He shows her face and feet to the camera. If you can stomach it, look at the shot at the 2:32 mark, and compare it to the face and legs of the babies shown in the photos with the 1978 coffin. Compare the smaller baby’s bare buttocks and underarms to the other baby. They look exactly the same.

The doctor flashes the baby’s genitals at the audience for an excruciatingly long time, and even holds the legs apart to open the labia to show that she has a vagina– remember, the baby in the photo was female as well– and then we see Pavone laying the baby to rest in a tan wood coffin with a brass plate, and purple velvet and satin lining. It looks exactly like the one that bears a brass plate from 1978. It does not look as if it’s been underground and then unearthed. He covers the baby with a blanket, makes the sign of the cross and closes the lid. He claims in the note on the video that “the babies were subsequently buried by Priests for Life.” Here’s a screenshot of that claim:

That baby, and the other baby with the black head, or babies who looked absolutely identical to them in every way, were portrayed in a coffin that said they died in 1978 from saline abortions, not prostaglandin. And note that the date says “May 26, 2008.” For Pavone to be telling the truth, both babies would disappear from public appearances sometime before May 26, 2008, because they had been buried, and that would be that.

In August of 2012, a photo was published in the Catholic News Herald of Pavone touring the country with a white-lined coffin, displaying an aborted fetus identical in size to the one of the ones from the 1978 coffin, and you can see on page 2-3 that the baby is all black except for a bare patch on the leg and buttock and a slim bare patch under the arm– identical to one of the babies from the 1978 coffin and to the other baby from the 2008 video. The article said that this baby was “Baby Choice” and not the same Baby Choice that Pavone had kept in his office “since 1985,” but a different Baby Choice:

Organizers insisted that they treat the baby’s remains with dignity and respect as part of their fight to end abortion.
Dr. Patricia McEwen – whom the Priests for Life office referred inquiries to about “Baby Choice” and now serves with Operation Save America, Life Coalition International and Doctors for Life International – said she first met “Baby Choice” in 1991, and that the baby regularly travels around the country in anti-abortion demonstrations. The baby is the victim of “a very old saline abortion,” McEwen said, and is kept in formaldehyde when not being used in demonstrations.
“We’ve gotten attached to this little one. She’s the evidence of our sins, of our crimes against the little ones,” said evangelist Rusty Lee Thomas of Operation Rescue/Operation Save America, who said he once carried “Baby Choice” on a six-month walk across America in 2004. “It’s not like we want to exploit her or anything like that…” ‘

By their own admission, they’ve been denying that baby burial since at least 1991– twenty-two years.

It was also said that they were going to bury that baby after the demonstrations.

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