On February 18, an Ohio judge ruled that a Buckeye State law requiring that the remains of aborted unborn children be either interred or cremated violated a (state) constitutional amendment passed in 2023 to protect abortion rights. The law, passed in 2021 after revelations that fetal remains from abortion clinics were being dumped in landfills, was permanently blocked by the judge’s ruling.

Ohio’s law was not unique. In neighboring Indiana, the state went through a prolonged fight in federal court with Planned Parenthood over similar legislation, signed by then-Governor Mike Pence, and now in force after a lower federal court judge initially blocked it.

Why the different outcomes? Indiana’s law was challenged while Roe v. Wade was still in force. When Dobbs overturned Roe, protective pro-life legislation already on the books in Indiana came back into force.

In Ohio, powerful interests (many from out-of-state) used the state’s initiative and referendum process—a vehicle to bypass the legislature and put public questions directly on the ballot—to write a pro-abortion amendment into the state constitution. They succeeded in November 2023.

Efforts to insert pro-abortion amendments into state constitutions have often been advertised as “codifying” abortion rights guaranteed by Roe v. Wade. Voters are now learning what the pro-life community was saying for fifty years: Roe guaranteed a right to abortion-on-demand through birth (and, in practice, often a little bit later). Lawsuits successfully challenging pro-life attempts to restrict abortion—which abortionists disparaged as “TRAP” laws (targeted restrictions on abortion providers)—have revealed just how absolute the “right” conferred by Roe was. The difference now is: Absent Roe, states have leeway to debate these proposals. But when states straitjacket themselves with new constitutional strictures designed to “codify” Roe, we’re back to pre-2022 and the worst of Roe’s “undue burden” standard.

Abortionists certainly deem requirements for hospital admitting privileges, waiting periods prior to abortion, parental notification, or ultrasound requirements (including showing the ultrasound to the patient) as dispensable TRAP laws interfering with their business.

Likewise fetal burial/cremation laws.

Since Roe was decided in 1973, over 65 million abortions have taken place in the United States. The obvious question that is never asked is: “Where are the bodies?” Certainly not buried. At least not most of them.

In 2022, at the height of President Biden’s lawfare campaign against peaceful pro-life protestors, Washington, D.C. investigators removed a box from a protestor’s home that contained the remains of five aborted fetuses. To date, neither the federal nor district government has investigated whether those five unborn children were victims of late-term abortions prohibited under federal law, and/or whether they were born alive. When Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell was convicted of murder (for cutting the spinal cords of newly born, late term babies) and manslaughter (for the death of a “patient”), prosecutors found similar evidence in his home, which had become a charnel house of pickled fetal remains.

Why does Planned Parenthood oppose fetal burial laws? They abridge an aborting woman’s freedom of religion and speech, they argue, by forcing her to show respect towards fetal remains as if they were human. The requirement to bury or cremate fetal remains also imposes unnecessary costs on women, as well as a psychological burden that serves no “medical purpose” but rather advances a pro-life position.

The truth is that these laws are like red capes in front of bulls—by suggesting fetal remains are different from, say, dental pulp at the orthodontist’s office or an appendix from the gastric surgery suite, they address the uncomfortable notion of fetal humanity. After having done their euphemistic best to reduce the unborn child to “a blob of tissue” or a “clump of cells,” having to treat them differently from other biohazard medical waste reopens a discussion abortionists want permanently closed.

That’s not to say that those “blobs of tissue” cannot be humanized if there is money to be made from them. The same Planned Parenthood that sues Midwestern states for demanding fetal interment or cremation was caught on video ten years ago conducting a lucrative trade in fetal body parts, with its abortionists discussing how procedures could be modified to ensure optimal extraction of profitable fetal organs such as livers.

*     *     *     *

In the classic Greek tragedy Antigone, King Creon orders that Polynices, who was slain in a battle he waged against his own city of Thebes, be treated in death as a traitor, his body left in the field as carrion. In ancient Greece, not to bury a body was the ultimate degradation. Antigone, Polynices sister, defies the king’s command and buries her brother, bringing on her own death as well as that of Creon’s son. Nearly 2,500 years after Sophocles wrote Antigone, the play stands as a powerful warning to those who today not only acquiesce in the killing of unborn children but would refuse them a proper burial. Who would have imagined that in the 21st century burying the dead, a corporal act of mercy, would be controversial.