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Keep Showing People The Truth, Urges Tour Speaker

One poster that Defend Lifers displayed on this year’s Face the Truth Tour shows the bloody remains of a first trimester aborted baby.

Michigan pro-life veteran Monica Miller took that photo.

On June 23, at a luncheon at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen in Baltimore for Face the Truthers, Mrs. Miller told them the story behind the photo.

The baby was aborted at the Michigan Avenue Medical Center in Chicago, where Miller had spent a lot of time sidewalk counseling.

She and other pro-lifers learned that the abortionist was throwing the remains of the unborn babies out in the trash in the alley – “the stinkiest, filthiest, garbage-all-over, most rat-infested alley you’ve ever seen,” said Miller.

From March through April, 1987, she and Tim Murphy, of the Pro-Life Action League, retrieved the bodies of about 600 babies for proper burial.

“The last work of mercy, which is to bury the dead, was the first – and only – work of mercy those babies ever had,” she said.

At one point, Miller, Murphy, and a dozen other pro-lifers held a press conference on Michigan Avenue in front of the abortion mill, with the babies’ bodies, reassembled, on a table set up before them.

“I saw women come up to the table,” she recalled; “they were absolutely stunned!  They would cry, ‘That’s a baby!’

“They had absolutely no prior preparation by which they could steel themselves, get their psychological defense mechanisms up.

“People that saw that display went away changed forever.”

That’s what happens on Face the Truth Tours, said Miller.

“Oh, sure, you get all the hand gestures and remarks:  ‘You’re crazed!’  ‘You’re weirdos!’  ‘That’s disgusting!’” she admitted.

“But there’s a certain expression that comes on a person’s face when they see the signs – a specific, particular kind of expression of – well, shock, but an awareness that they’ve been touched at a deep level.  And when they leave, they are not the same.”

The very last babies that Monica retrieved from the Michigan Avenue Medical Center, in April 1987, a box of about 40 babies, received an unusual blessing.

Monica and her husband took the babies to St. Nicholas Albanian Greek Orthodox Church – a church made famous that year because the Virgin in an icon there was weeping.

Monica said to her husband, “Let’s ask the priest if he will bless the babies with the tears that fall from the eyes of the Virgin.”

When they approached the priest with the box and their request, he was aghast at first.

But he took the bodies to the chapel, where beautiful icons covered the walls and the ceiling, bathed in a soft, amber light.

Placing the box on a chair next to the weeping icon, he opened it and gave a very long blessing.

“When he turned around and looked at us, he had tears in his eyes.  He couldn’t say a word,” said Monica.

The night before, those babies had been thrown in the trash.  But the next day, they were in a shrine, presented to God.

“The Culture of Death puts them in the trash, but the Culture of Life consigns them to God:  that’s what you do in pro-life work,” said Miller.

“You are claiming the unwanted ones, the outcast ones, back to God.”

One important way to look at taking part in Face the Truth tours, she suggested, is that when you’re standing next to that poster of an aborted baby, “you’re standing next to Jesus Christ, as if you were back in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago.”

That too was a public venue, she pointed out.  Jesus was the object of name-calling and derision.

“But now, all the vilification and mockery that was aimed at Him is being aimed at you.”

Miller urged pro-lifers to recognize that we are living in “an emergency mode.

“This emergency is spread out over time, but your response to it should be immediate.”

“You have to put aside things that are in your way; you have to prioritize, say, ‘Every Thursday I will be out at the abortion mill,’ or work at the crisis pregnancy center – or I will work for a pro-life candidate.”

Don’t make peace with abortion, she warned, because if you do, you become part of the Culture of Death.

“Pick what you’re going to do and then stick with it.”