Editor’s Note: The following essay was first published as an introduction to “Unsafee, “ a report from Americans United for Life. It is shown below with minor changes.
In In the fall of 2019, the family of the late abortionist Ulrich George Klopfer made a gruesome discovery. Tidying his Illinois home after his death, they found the medically preserved remains of more than 2,200 unborn children – evidently victims of his decades-long career performing tens of thousands of abortions, earning him a reputation as the most prolific abortionist in Indiana.
They later discovered a stash of 165 fetal body parts hidden in the trunk of one of Klopfer’s cars. Despite a subsequent law enforcement investigation, we still don’t know the abortionist’s motivation to keep these gruesome trophies; whatever disturbed reasons he had for retrieving them, went with him to his grave.
Perhaps more striking than the lack of clarity about this gruesome discovery was the relative lack of public curiosity about it. Klopfer’s stock of corpses received relatively little national attention immediately after local news told the story, and the entire event went in and out of the regular news cycle in less than a week.
Aside from an op-ed by columnist Ross Douthat, the New York Times published only one brief report the day the news went public. Over the next week, a few major news outlets offered one or two short articles outlining the basic facts of what had happened, but most of the ongoing interest and coverage came from local journalists. Hardly any reporters asked politicians for comment on the issue, and certainly not all Democrats who support unrestricted legal abortion.
If the remains in Klopfer’s possession had been those of 2,411 human adults rather than unborn children, his grotesque corps would have been in national attention for months. We would still discuss it today, remembering him as the most infamous serial killer in American history. But because those little bodies he so arrogantly destroyed the lives of belonged to children still in the womb, most of us closed our eyes and turned away, preferring to pretend we hadn’t seen it .
The natural reluctance to grapple with these kinds of horrible incidents may be understandable. For a society that flees the reality of abortion as long as we do, such an unvarnished display of its destruction can be difficult to face. But it’s important to realize that a significant portion of our ignorance about Klopfer was the product of deliberate decisions by our mass media, whose reluctance to focus on the story came as no surprise to someone who regularly follows our debates on abortion.
Although Americans today are just as divided on abortion policy as they were in 1973 when the Supreme Court ruled Roe to Wade, the most powerful voices in our increasingly influential mass media have fallen almost uniformly on the side of legal abortion. This results in a distorted view of our abortion debate, and even of the facts underlying our profound disagreements about abortion. If you want accurate, complete, and unbiased information about abortion – even basic facts like when, where, and how often it takes place – the mainstream media is about the last place to look.
More often than not, experts and reporters either completely ignore the topic of abortion or give only cursory coverage, as they did with Klopfer’s stockpile of fetal remains. When they report on abortion at all, they omit essential facts, twist to weigh more heavily against the anti-abortion argument, or misrepresent facts to make the case for legal abortion appear more favorable.
Americans United for Life’s “Unsafe” report is a powerful antidote to that pervasive media-induced ignorance. In the report you will find hard data that is so difficult to locate – the kind of facts that are crucial to informed, honest, clear discussions about the reality of abortion in our country.
As much as the seven Supreme Court justices who legalized abortion hoped their decision would get through Roe would settle the abortion debate forever, that was clearly not the case. Nearly 50 years later, abortion remains as controversial as ever, arguably the most contentious issue in American political life. If we ever hope to resolve this controversial battle, we must relentlessly pursue the facts so that we can honestly assess the effects of legal abortion over the decades. Those facts and their dissemination are essential in finding ways to change our abortion policy and protect the least of us – not just the innocent unborn child, but her mother too.
At this point, let’s return to George Klopfer’s story, which really started way earlier than 2019 when those fetal remains were found in his possession. That discovery was not the first time the abortionist had caught the attention of local authorities. In 2016, the Indiana medical licensing agency suspended Klopfer’s license indefinitely after finding that he violated state law and standard medical procedures while operating three abortion businesses in northern Indiana.
Among other violations, Klopfer had failed to file pregnancy termination reports with the Department of Health and the Department of Child Services after performing abortions on at least two 13-year-old girls. He also admitted that he had aborted a 10-year-old girl who had been raped by her uncle, and he never reported it to the state.
While running his business, Klopfer was routinely unable to ensure that qualified personnel were present when patients were receiving or recovering from anesthesia before and after abortion procedures, and he gave patients the correct information and information for at least 18 hours before performing an abortion. to provide guidance. , as required by state law.
Like the stories behind every stat in ‘Unsafe’, the story of Klopfer’s career as a nasty and dangerous abortionist received almost no national attention. As a result, he received almost no public attention outside the local area – neither before nor after his family discovered all those body parts in his home. This persistent lack of attention illustrates the wider lack of public knowledge about the horrific reality of abortion in our country.
Americans know nothing about Klopfer, because abortion advocates and their media allies prefer to ignore or hide information that the abortion industry exposes. Most people don’t look for facts about abortion because they prefer not to think about it, because they don’t know what to look for, or because they don’t realize they should look at all.
Far too many Americans are unaware that, in addition to taking unborn human lives, abortion is unsafe for women. Most do not realize that even so-called ‘sanitary’ abortions pose a serious risk to the physical and psychological health of pregnant mothers. Despite Roe‘s pledge to take abortion out of the alley and bring it into the clean light of the modern business, women still have serious side effects and sometimes die from abortion procedures – all behind closed doors and away from the front pages of our major newspapers .
Those obnoxious, secret facts explain why abortion advocates are so reluctant to talk about men like Klopfer, his unsafe business, and his collection of fetal remains. Most abortionists, of course, don’t collect the remains of the unborn children they killed and keep them in molding bins and old Styrofoam coolers. Instead, they follow common industry practice and dispose of those tiny bodies along with piles of medical waste.
Is that really better?
We prefer to ignore abortionists like Klopfer because their stories force us to face the brutal reality of abortion, to consider that no matter how safe or clean a business seems, every abortion ends in an empty womb and death. of an unborn child.
That’s the simple, horrible fact that advocates of legal abortion desperately want to avoid. It is much easier to defend the right to abortion if it is covered with expressions such as ‘women’s health care’ or ‘the right to choose’. Recognizing that any abortion ends the life of a particular human being and defending it under those conditions is much more difficult and much less popular.
That’s why it can be so difficult to find facts like those in ‘Unsafe’. That is why most media outlets never tell a story showing how the abortion industry is profiting from killing unborn children and victimizing their mothers. Therefore, the victims of Klopfer were buried by the state of Indiana in a mass grave with little more than a local news report to mark the occasion.
Like Klopfer’s story, of the women who were abused in his companies, of the unborn children whose bodies he kept and simply threw away, the reality in ‘Unsafe’ is hard to face. But we cannot close our eyes to it. We must not forget what we saw.
We can’t tell ourselves that George Klopfer’s companies were an anomaly, that most abortions are sterile and hygienic, and safe for pregnant mothers – not when the statistics tell a different story. We cannot forever prevent thousands of small bodies from being thrown behind companies every day. “Unsafe” offers a glimpse of the truth for anyone who wants to look at it. Let us face the damage abortion has done in our country without flinching, and pray for the courage to do what we can to end it.