I can only imagine

It's something right out of a Law & Order SVU episode.

Mummified baby found in storage unit

Wrapped in newspapers from the 1950's. The child's body, a baby boy, was so well preserved it still had hair. Normally this might give me shivers but mostly it just breaks my heart.

While there is no way of knowing what happened to this poor child, I can imagine… and since my imagination tends to run wild I immediately began to ask myself -- what could lead to such a tragedy?

True this child could be a stillborn or victim of a different crime but a different story is entirely plausible.

I can imagine a woman in the 1950s desperately afraid at the thought of being pregnant. Maybe she was too poor, too stressed out with a house already full of kids. Perhaps it wasn’t her husband’s child or perhaps she didn’t have a husband. In the 1950’s this sort of social violation would have been devastating for a woman’s reputation.

It’s those circumstances that make women feel like they have no other options. Worse, it’s not uncommon for this type of tragedy to happen even today. Young girls who are too embarrassed and afraid end up giving birth in bathrooms and throwing their infants away.

It’s the saddest scenario I can imagine. What makes me so angry is that even now we leave women few options. Pro-lifers work tirelessly to restrict access to birth control, emergency contraception and abortion. Worse, when teenage girls decide they’re going to try and make a go of it as young single mothers we shame them and practically treat them like criminals

Maybe we’ll never know what happened to that poor infant but if the scenario I imagined is true, we have two victims: the baby and a young woman who lived with the weight of that terrible decision.