BOULDER, Colo. — In the shadow of the Rockies, just east of this college town known for its radical politics, Sacred Heart of Mary Church has enjoyed more than 100 years as a quiet, low-profile country parish.

That all changed in the days surrounding Saturday, Jan. 22, the day marking the 32nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade — the Supreme Court decision that forced states to allow abortion on demand.

The parish campus and adjoining cemetery were swarming with reporters, protesters, TV cameras and satellite trucks before, during and after the anniversary. A week later, abortion supporters, waving colorful pictures of babies killed in what they called “back-alley” abortions, continued staging demonstrations outside the parish grounds.

“The publicity has done some good, in spreading our peaceful pro-life message, but it turns out to be more of a circus than I ever imagined,” said Father Dorino De Lazzer, the soft-spoken, media-shy pastor of Sacred Heart of Mary.

Last summer, parishioner Suzie LaVelle approached Father De Lazzer to ask if she could seek publicity about burials of aborted children. For nearly 10 years, the parish has buried babies killed at the Boulder Abortion Clinic — which specializes in late-term abortions. Since 1996, the church has buried approximately 5,000 children near the Sacred Heart of Mary Memorial Wall for the Unborn in the church cemetery.

“I approved her request, with trepidation, because I was worried about negative media attention and protesters,” Father De Lazzer said.

LaVelle, co-founder of the memorial and director of the parish’s Respect Life Committee, explained to Father De Lazzer that women mourning abortions and miscarriages experience comfort and healing by visiting the wall.

“While this is a wonderful, prayerful place for women to grieve, the vast majority of women who’ve had abortions or miscarriages suffer in silence without any knowledge of our memorial,” said LaVelle, who suffered a late-term miscarriage decades ago. “I wanted to get the word out, so that mothers, fathers, grandparents and others who are suffering from the loss of an unborn child would know about it.”

The burials are sporadic, occurring several times a year, when Crist Mortuary delivers ashes of aborted babies to the church. After LaVelle got permission to seek publicity, the ashes didn’t arrived from the mortuary until the first week of January, which placed the burial on the weekend of the Roe v. Wade anniversary.

LaVelle contacted local newspapers and TV stations with a brief email that explained the routine burials and the one planned for Jan. 23. A media frenzy ensued, and LaVelle found herself talking to TV cameras and radio hosts from dawn until dusk.

As a result, a service and candlelight vigil the night of Jan. 21 brought hundreds of mourners from throughout metro Boulder and nearby Denver, and even from neighboring Kansas and Wyoming. One protester, who refused to give her name, told reporters she’d rather see the remains of aborted babies “dumped in the trash, poured down the garbage disposal or used as compost” than buried in a Catholic cemetery.

Talk radio devoted days to the burial, with callers overwhelmingly supporting the church. One of Denver’s leading talk-radio hosts, Peter Boyles, said critics of the church were harming their own so-called “pro-choice” cause by expressing concern over the remains of children whom the abortion industry has conditioned the public not to care about.

“The fact these people care [about the ashes] is a window into their souls,” Boyles told his audience, referring to the church’s critics.

Author and newspaper editor Pamela White — a well-known feminist and abortion advocate in Colorado — also criticized critics of the burials.

“After an abortion, a woman has the right to retrieve the remains of her fetus,” White said. “If she chooses not to, she has abandoned the remains and given up her say in the matter. If you give up a living child for adoption, it’s wrong to show up two years later and complain that the adoptive parents are taking the kid to church. This is no different.”

Though the media circus and protesters disrupted life as usual at the parish, Father De Lazzer said it has constructively altered the abortion debate by causing even pro-abortion activists to express concern about the remains of aborted children.

Sergio Gutierrez, spokesman for the Archdiocese of Denver, told the Denver Post he was puzzled by the critics.

“If they’re not unborn children, why are they concerned about this at all?” Gutierrez asked. “And if they are unborn children, wouldn’t this be an appropriate way to behave? They can’t have it both ways.”

Gutierrez told the Register that Archbishop Charles Chaput was planning no statement about the burial, as it was the activity of an individual parish and not the archdiocese.

“I’m seeing a change in the mood of the country right now, regarding abortion and other moral issues,” Father De Lazzer said. “I’m glad about what we did at this time.”

The burial took place after the regular 9 a.m. Sunday Mass. Hundreds processed from the church to the memorial for the unborn, where a hole awaited the ashes of nearly 1,000 babies killed at the abortion clinic.

The day before the burial, on the afternoon of the Roe v. Wade anniversary, Boulder Abortion Clinic director Warren Hern contacted Crist Mortuary and demanded that it retrieve one of two boxes of ashes from the church. Hern argued that his contract with the mortuary, which he refused to share with reporters, gave him some say in the disposition of remains for 120 days after cremation. The other box stayed at the church because it contained remains that had been cremated earlier.

“We don’t know any details about the arrangement between the Boulder Abortion Clinic and the mortuary,” LaVelle said. “The mortuary complied with the abortion clinic, and we complied with the mortuary.”

Mortuary officials and Hern declined to discuss the issue with the Register. LaVelle promised to work with the mortuary to recover and bury the remaining ashes. She said it’s clear the church will no longer receive ashes from Boulder Abortion Clinic, but she hopes other mortuaries and crematories will seek burial space at the church for abortion remains.

Sacred Heart of Mary began burying the ashes in 1996, when Hern hired Howe Mortuary to cremate the bodies of babies killed at his business. Colorado law requires incineration of medical waste that contains “recognizable, anatomical human remains.”

When remains first arrived at the mortuary, young staffers opened a container and were deeply disturbed by what they saw. Mortuary director Chuck Myers promised to handle future shipments from the abortion business by himself.

But Myers, a pro-choice Seventh-day Adventist, was himself disturbed by Hern’s wreckage. He contacted Father Andrew Kemberling, pastor of Sacred Heart of Mary at the time, whom he’d worked with at funerals. Myers didn’t want to dump the ashes in the trash, and Father Kemberling offered space in the church cemetery. Years later, Crist Mortuary got the Hern contract. Myers later took over as director of Crist, and he re-initiated the burials.

Though Hern criticized the burials for exploiting “the private grief and pain of women” who’ve had abortions, women who have had abortions expressed their gratitude at the burial.

“The law said it was okay, so I thought it was a solution,” said Diane Sillstrop, a Protestant from Longmont, Colo., who, as a teen-ager, aborted twins. “As time went on, there was intense pain, guilt and a sense of loss building up in me. I frequently bring women who’ve had abortions to this memorial because it’s a way for them to experience the forgiveness and healing that finally brought me peace.”

Hern wrote the definitive how-to textbook on abortion, titled The Abortion Practice. On CNN, Hern called the remains from his clinic “specimens” and “products of conception.”

In a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association of Planned Parenthood Physicians in 1978, however, Hern made it clear that he’s not aborting clumps of lifeless cells. He wrote, “There is no possibility of denial of an act of destruction by the operator. It is before one’s eyes. The sensation of dismemberment flows through the forceps like an electric current.”

In 2003, Hern wrote a letter to the Internet magazine Slate, in which he described one of his typical late-term abortions: “I inserted my forceps into the uterus and applied them to the head of the fetus, which was still alive, since fetal injection is not done at that stage of pregnancy. I closed the forceps, crushing the skull of the fetus, and withdrew the forceps. The fetus, now dead, slid out more or less intact.”

Sacred Heart of Mary parishioner Michael Messaros, who helped with a burial in 2004, said that, even after cremation, it’s clear that the remains are those of human beings.

“I did the pouring, and as I did so, I saw bones, tiny bones,” Messaros said. “These were recognizably human bone fragments, such as the tip end of a tiny femur. It was then that it struck me: This bag of dust and bone fragments was that of my fellow brothers and sisters. It had taken a lot of killing to fill that bag, and all the other bags before and since.”

Wayne Laugesen writes

from Boulder, Colorado.