By Dave Andrusko
It was not until a columnist for the publication The Daily Maverick wrote “A letter to aborted twins” that I became aware of the double tragedy that took place last November in Mahikeng, the capital city of the North-West Province of South Africa.
Incredibly, a member of the community found the bodies of twin sisters in plastic bags. According to a local publication, the girls were “fully grown between 8 and 9 months.”
When the forensic police arrived and took the girls’ bodies from the bags, “The pale skin with full heads of hair, still dripping with blood and amniotic fluid, showed they had been aborted in the early hours of the morning.”
According to the publication, bystanders “could not believe their eyes.” Some of the women standing in the street at the corner of Carney and Short Streets said, “This act on its own shows the extent that people disregard life,” adding, “Do you know how many of us want kids and somebody decides to abort two children?”
The original story does not mention what Robyn Wolfson Vorster talked about in her powerful “A letter to aborted twins”–that the mother evidently took chemical abortifacients.
Vorster’s letter was one long lament that the community had “failed” the mother:
We failed you because we didn’t let her know that she had options: that she didn’t have to abort you, that there were arms aching to hold you—arms that ache still. We failed you because we have allowed the stigma of adoption to remain unchallenged. We failed you because your mother was not legally permitted to abandon you safely. We failed you because we didn’t police the people who illegally sold your mother the abortion drug, because they are allowed to carry out “safe abortions” with impunity—safe for whom, I ask?
Vorster continued
We failed you because if you died in the womb (even on the cusp of birth), our law says you were not a person and that you have no legal rights. We failed you because if you were born alive no one will ever know or care: forensic pathology services will list you as a “stillbirth” even though you took a breath, and the police will not classify you as a murder statistic or investigate your “unnatural death”.
Vorster concludes “Dear innocents”
We failed you and nothing we do can bring you back. But, your deaths did not pass unnoticed, little ones. We cannot continue to fail the many others that will follow after you. Next time we must do better. If so, maybe your appalling and senseless deaths will finally have some meaning.
A tip of the hat to LifeNews.
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