Exploitation of the dead is not pro-life. It is contempt for life.

y now you’ve all heard the hor­rif­ic details about Lau­ren Handy, the so-called pro-life activist who was keep­ing five frozen fetus­es in her home. There are still unan­swered ques­tions about how these dead bod­ies were obtained, and whether they were all (or if any of them were) actu­al­ly abort­ed; for exam­ple, one was still intact and attached to the pla­cen­ta, and anoth­er was en caul. There is some spec­u­la­tion that Handy, with or with­out the group she belongs to (Pro­gres­sive Anti-Abor­tion Upris­ing, or PAAU), intend­ed to use the corpses in a pub­lic­i­ty stunt of some sort. I don’t know. My friend Mary Pez­zu­lo at Steel Mag­ni­fi­cat writes about all of it here, and you should read her arti­cle. It’s the only real­ly good thing I’ve read about the whole ugly sto­ry.

Sto­ries like this are hard for me to write about, and part of the rea­son is because I lost my daugh­ter to a still­birth six­teen years ago. Cait­lyn’s birth­day is the day after East­er this year. I’ve held my dead baby in my arms, and I don’t like to see graph­ic pic­tures of dead babies shoved in my face. I’ve stopped pray­ing the Rosary at abor­tion facil­i­ties because too many peo­ple don’t have the sense or decen­cy not to show up hold­ing the most graph­ic and, frankly, exploita­tive pic­tures imag­in­able.

But the oth­er rea­son it’s hard to write about is because I still imag­ine that peo­ple like Lau­ren Handy rep­re­sent a mere hand­ful of out­liers and cra­zies, and the sen­sa­tion­al news likes to expose out­liers and cra­zies, and the uni­ver­sal reac­tion is shock and hor­ror, and why do I need to con­vince any­one to be shocked and hor­ri­fied? Why do I need to work any­one up into a lath­er they’re already in?

I sup­pose that’s part­ly true. If you’re not instinc­tive­ly aghast at the news that some­one has been keep­ing five dead babies in her home, pos­si­bly to use them to get pub­lic­i­ty for a cause, then I doubt I have the pow­er to say any­thing that will get you aghast.

But at the same time, Lau­ren Handy is not an out­lier. High-pro­file peo­ple, includ­ing high-pro­file priests like Frank Pavone, have been exploit­ing dead bod­ies for many years. You remem­ber that sto­ry, sure­ly? Pavone, who is not in good stand­ing with his dio­cese in Texas and prefers to free­lance his priest­hood in Flori­da, took the corpse of an infant (pre­sum­ably one that had been killed in an abor­tion), placed it on a Catholic altar, and filmed a cam­paign com­mer­cial for Don­ald Trump. He told incon­sis­tent sto­ries about how he acquired the body and what he did with it after he turned the cam­era off. In six years, no one has found out, unless some­one has and they’re keep­ing it hush-hush and Pavone for some rea­son has man­aged to escape lai­ciza­tion or arrest or both.

Then, on Twit­ter, I read this bizarre defense of Handy from Son­ja Morin, who is an “orga­niz­er” at PAAU:

After Emmett Till (a 13 year old boy) was lynched, his moth­er request­ed that his wake be open cas­ket. Reporters showed up and took pho­tos of the wake, and Emmett’s blud­geoned head, still swollen from the blows of lynch­ers. It was the first that many Amer­i­cans saw of lynch­ing.

But you see, the dif­fer­ence is that Emmett Till’s moth­er decid­ed to have an open cas­ket and Emmett Till’s moth­er was the only one who had the right to make that deci­sion because Emmett Till’s moth­er was the only one who could act on behalf of Emmett Till when Emmett Till could no longer act on behalf of him­self. No anti-lynch­ing activist who did not know Emmett Till stole the body of Emmett Till, freeze it, and keep it in their home until such time as they could parade it down Penn­syl­va­nia Avenue and up to the very gates of the White House as a dis­play of the hor­rors of racism. No priest got his hands on Emmett Till, put him on an altar, and film a cam­paign com­mer­cial for a dem­a­gogue with bad hair. Emmett Till’s body was dis­played in an open cas­ket at a prop­er funer­al pre­ced­ing a prop­er bur­ial to dis­pose of his body in a prop­er man­ner.

In that same thread on Twit­ter, Mary Ham­mond right­ly described the dis­play of dead bod­ies by activists as “vio­lence porn.” And the ratio­nale self-described pro-lif­ers use to shove those bod­ies in peo­ple’s faces—that they must expose the hor­ror in order to make abor­tion unthinkable—doesn’t match the evi­dence. Such pic­tures are wide­ly avail­able, and I haven’t run across any­one who has­n’t seen them. What­ev­er good, if any, can be done by them has been done. No one’s opin­ion about abor­tion is going to be changed by them. If the pic­tures had the effect the activists say they have, abor­tion would have been his­to­ry long ago.

Those who exploit dead babies, in the way that peo­ple like Lau­ren Handy and Frank Pavone do, claim to do so because they want to defend life. But part of what makes life sacred is an indi­vid­u­al’s agency and auton­o­my over him­self, or her­self, and over his body, her body. It is evil to take it upon your­self to use some­one else’s body to advance some polit­i­cal cause you hap­pen to favor, how­ev­er just you think that cause is, how­ev­er just that cause may in fact be. Their body does not belong to you, and they have no abil­i­ty to act or speak for them­selves. They belong to God alone and are to be entrust­ed to God alone, as the Cat­e­chism of the Catholic Church §2300 insists:

The bod­ies of the dead must be treat­ed with respect and char­i­ty, in faith and hope of the Res­ur­rec­tion. The bur­ial of the dead is a cor­po­ral work of mer­cy; it hon­ors the chil­dren of God, who are tem­ples of the Holy Spir­it.

We heard a lot of talk, after free­lance priest Pavone’s stunt six years ago, about how “des­per­ate times require des­per­ate mea­sures”; and Pavone him­self crowed on Twit­ter that his actions led to the elec­tion of Trump, which led to SCOTUS nom­i­nees who might over­turn Roe. I wrote about all that here. It’s the heresy of Con­se­quen­tial­ism, which Pope St. John Paul II con­demned in Ver­i­tatis Splen­dor. The ends do not jus­ti­fy the means, and it is par­tic­u­lar­ly hyp­o­crit­i­cal to exploit a human body in order to advance what you describe as a pro-life cause.

You can say that you are anti-abor­tion, but don’t fool your­self that you are pro-life. Being pro-life is much, much larg­er than being against abor­tion; being pro-life is not about the mere fact of life but about the dig­ni­ty of life. It’s not so much about babies get­ting born but about the per­son­hood, human worth, and indi­vid­ual agency of each liv­ing per­son.

A dead body, because it belongs to God and God alone, is not yours to do with as you will (as though it was ever yours to do with as you will). By treat­ing it as though it were, by not bury­ing it imme­di­ate­ly and entrust­ing it to God, you do not prove your supe­ri­or pro-life cre­den­tials. You—you, Lau­ren Handy and you, Frank Pavone, and you who defend them and do the same—prove only that you have con­tempt for life.

Mary Pez­zu­lo writes in her arti­cle:

I am a Catholic. I believe that human beings have intrin­sic val­ue from con­cep­tion until they die. They ought not to be abused. They ought not to be killed. They also ought not to be exploit­ed and used as a com­mer­cial for anybody’s non­prof­it or anar­chist group.

That leaves me feel­ing very alone right now.

You’re not alone, Mary.