Baby in a Jar

I’ll never forget the day in seventh grade that forever affected my life.

“There’s a jar on the shelf with a little baby in it!” the girl nervously whispered.

Several of us were gathered around one of the lab stations in our seventh-grade science class when my wide-eyed classmate revealed her gruesome discovery.

Of course, we couldn’t believe it. We all knew those crowded bookshelves in the far corner of the room. They were filled with jars of frogs and snakes and other former living things that now stood preserved in some brownish-yellow liquid, made cloudy and dense by their slowly decomposing bodies. Every specimen had that same sickening hue, long void of life and whatever color the creature once had.

A friend and I made our way to the back of the room amid the clinking of test tubes and mayhem while the class of 12-year-olds tried to organize in little groups for the day’s lab activity. The year was 1974. It was a time when Bunsen burners, formaldehyde, scalpels and preteens regularly interacted in public school science classrooms.

It was also the year after it became legal in America to kill preborn human babies—and put them in jars on dusty shelves along with mice and frogs.

Was it really legal? You know, to kill a baby? To put it in a jar on a shelf? These questions swamped my mind as I spotted the jar in disbelief. Crammed inside the pint-size tomb and immersed in that same sickening liquid was a perfectly formed little baby. A human baby.

Abortion was not discussed in middle school in those days. But our gentle, kind science teacher thought the truth about the product of abortion should be known. I remember him softly saying, “God rest his soul” as he joined us at the bookshelves in our silent contemplation. He didn’t need to expound. The silence that followed spoke volumes.

But to this day I wish I knew more about the helpless little baby whose life had been snuffed out. While others were preoccupied about where our teacher got the baby, I was struck by his dead stillness. I marveled at his tiny toes and the perfectly formed delicate rib cage barely visible through taut, translucent skin. And I had the unshakeable feeling that his death was very, very wrong.

Something is very, very wrong in a country where little human babies continue to be legally slaughtered. If more people saw their little bodies and witnessed that they are not formless blobs of tissue as our own government tells young, unsuspecting mothers in the midst of emotional turmoil, then perhaps our American holocaust would finally end.

But the truth is largely hidden.

This is a very important week in the fight to tell the truth about abortion. The Supreme Court heard arguments on Monday regarding the Texas law that protects preborn life after six weeks from conception. And on Dec. 1, the Mississippi Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization prolife case goes before the high court. Between these two critical cases, the horrifically evil Roe v. Wade decision might finally be overturned. A decision in the Texas case could be handed down any day, and the Mississippi decision is expected to be handed down in June. Until then, all pro-life Christians must pray! {eoa}

Rebecca Hagelin is a weekly columnist for The Washington Times. Her popular column, “Inside the Culture,” appears in both the print and online editions every Monday. She has been a guest on thousands of radio and television programs over the years, and is published regularly in Townhall.com, PatriotPost.US and newspapers throughout the country. Rebecca has championed faith and family values for some 30 years, speaking around the nation educating parents on how to combat the negative effects of the pop media culture on their children.

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