Abortion

It was a Friday evening, and Chad Traywick and his wife, Darda, had just returned to their Houston, Texas, home only to find themselves surrounded by swarms of police – including the SWAT team and a van from the coroner's office.

After police pulled the shocked couple from their truck and patted them down, Det. John Hill informed Traywick that the police wanted to search his house.

As the detective explained, a local photo-finishing store had called police to report that Traywick had apparently beheaded and mutilated a newborn baby and had taken pictures of the infant. The SWAT team had come out in force, prepared to arrest satanic cult members – baby killers who had carried out a ritualistic mutilation connected with some Satan-worship ceremony, and who had the further audacity to photograph their victims.

But when officers entered the house, instead of finding occult paraphernalia associated with child sacrifices, they discovered pro-life and religious posters and books.

Traywick explained to police what had really happened. Newly active in the pro-life movement, Traywick had gone to a local abortion clinic – the Women's Pavilion – at 3 o'clock Saturday afternoon to scope out the best location for conducting a picket of the facility. Finding the building oddly deserted and the door open, he took a quick tour. After wandering through stylish, relaxing waiting areas and immaculate operating rooms, he entered a small back room filled with 15 plastic buckets with lids on. Realizing what they must contain, he snatched one of the buckets and made a fast retreat.

Enlisting the aid of his wife and a friend to videotape and photograph his opening of the container, Traywick slowly lifted out the contents from the bucket. What he found shocked him to the core. Rather than a tiny fetus as he had expected, what he pulled out appeared to be a full-grown baby, whose head and right arm had been ripped from his body and his brain removed. In his agony, the baby had bitten through his own tongue, no doubt while his head, grasped by forceps, was being literally ripped off his body. The little boy had an incision where other organs had apparently been removed – evidence that someone had sought more profit from the baby's death than the $1,800 the abortion had cost.

Traywick drove the film to the nearest one-hour photo developer. "I explained to them that the pictures were of an aborted baby and asked if they would have any problem or felt uncomfortable developing them," recalls Traywick.

Over the blare of the Christmas rush, the clerk hastily took the negatives and assured Traywick there would be no problem. When he returned for the developed photos, however, the clerk was obviously uncomfortable and nervous. The 35 mm photographs were so horrific that they strained the credibility of Traywick's story, and the store's staffer had called the police to investigate a grisly crime for which he held the evidence. Indeed, when the police saw the photos, they too were convinced a horrific crime had been committed.

After convincing police he was not a baby-killer on that 15th day of December, 1989, Traywick agreed to make a statement at police headquarters the following morning. On Jan. 20, 1990, Chad Traywick buried the aborted baby, whom he named David, after a memorial service attended by over 100 people.

That was 13 years ago yesterday. As we approach tomorrow's 30th anniversary of the Supreme Court's wretched and flagrantly unconstitutional Roe v. Wade abortion decision, I have a suggestion for how to end the war that has raged in this nation for three decades.

All of you "pro-choice" people out there: I'm going to give you the chance, in just a minute, to meet Baby David, to see one of the photos Chad Traywick took.

You don't have to look, of course; you can click out now. You can continue to believe in and cling desperately to your "fundamental constitutional right," "a private decision between a woman and her doctor," "a woman's right to choose" and other tortured euphemisms. But are you willing, just one time, to honestly and calmly confront what that "choice" really means? Baby David's fate, you see, is the result of "choice."

What about it? Are you willing to revisit your precious beliefs, to gaze upon the handiwork of your great and exalted right to "choose"?

WARNING: THE PHOTO LINKED IN THIS PARAGRAPH IS EXTREMELY DISTURBING AND NOT SUITABLE FOR VIEWING BY CHILDREN or overly sensitive adults. It depicts Baby David, the 28-week-old "fetus" that was aborted at the Women's Pavilion, a Houston, Texas, abortion clinic. The 16-inch pre-born underwent a D&E abortion, where limbs are ripped off one by one. The head and arm of this baby were literally ripped off the body. Click here to see Baby David.

Look at the photo and weep. Weep for that baby, and for all the other babies that have been tortured and butchered and vacuumed and ripped apart and chemically burned and whose skulls have been crushed and their brains sucked out over the last 30 years. Weep also for the 25 million American women who have been deceived, seduced, intimidated and corrupted into having abortions since 1973. Weep for the profound physical and psychological traumas many of these aborting women carry with them. Yes, weep for the living, as well as for the dead.

I'm sorry if this column is a little disturbing. But you see, I find it more than disturbing that over 40 million American babies have been conveniently, selfishly and heartlessly flushed out of our lives in the name of the Constitution, choice and freedom.

When will the 30-Year War over abortion end? It'll end when we are all able to look at the countless Baby Davids and say, "That's a choice we cannot and shall not make – ever again."

By the way, according to the latest statistics from Planned Parenthood's research wing, the Alan Guttmacher Institute, late-term abortions are up – way up – in America.