We Have Met the Halloween Monsters, and They Are Us

Today is Halloween or, as Christians prefer to call it, All Souls’ Eve.

Two years ago, I wrote this in my post, “Sick Halloween“:

When did Halloween morph from a holiday for little kiddies into an obsession with the morbid, the macabre, the grotesque, and the demonic? [...] All living things have the instinct to live, which expresses itself in our natural attraction to the life-affirming beauty of nature — of flora, fauna, animals, sea and sky — and a concomitant revulsion toward death.

But our society seems increasingly fixated on exactly the opposite — Thanatos — morbid images of decay, psychopathy, and death. Have you noticed the ubiquity of the skull, even in women’s fashion and baby clothes?

In his insightful book, Monsters From the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film, Dr. E. Michael Jones’ thesis is that our culture’s obsession with horror and the macabre is a result of our denial and suppression of morality. Horror is a product of a guilty conscience that will not admit its own wrongdoing. Individually and as a culture, we can escape the eternal dynamic of horror only by acknowledging the demands of an objective moral order.

In other words, Americans’ enthrallment with horror, which reaches its penultimate expression at Halloween, is the product of our suppression and denial of an objective and transcending morality — that there are such things as right and wrong, good and evil, irrespective of our self-serving proclivities rationalized as “moral relativism.”

Any psychologist can tell you what happens when something is suppressed: It inevitably “bubbles up” from the subterranean depths of our subconscious and “projected” outward. Our projection of the denied and suppressed morality is expressed as a morbid fascination with the macabre — with fictitious zombies and vampires, and Hollywood’s Texas chain-saw psychopaths.

But all along, the monsters are inside us: We have met the monsters, and they are us.

You want to see Halloween horror? Here’s a real-life horror that’s taking place in America.

It’s not enough that in the 40 years since Roe v. Wade, more than 54.5 million American babies were murdered through abortion – a figure that’s more than the population of many countries, such as South Africa (pop. 51.77 million).

It’s not enough that we have in America today so-called doctors like Kermit Gosnell who abort kill babies by twisting their heads off.

There are women in America today who give birth and then kill their babies or abandon them to die from starvation and exposure.

Winona Sheriff Dave Brand is haunted by a dead baby found floating in a bag in the Mississippi River near Winona two years ago on Sept. 5, 2011. The tiny infant was nicknamed “Angel Baby” because of angel statues that were found inside the bag in which someone had stuffed the still alive baby.

On April 7, 2012, Sheriff Brand and his wife Pamela gave “Angel Baby” a baptism, a funeral service at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, and a proper burial that was attended by other law enforcement officers and firefighters.

Winona County Sheriff’s Department honorary pallbearers carry Angel Baby’s 2-foot coffin to the burial site at Woodlawn Cemetery, April 7,
2012, in Winona, Minn.

Then there’s the Victoria’s Secret dead baby.

On October 16, 2013, a 17-year-old single mother of a two-year-old, Tiona Rodriguez, was detained at a Victoria’s Secret store in mid-town Manhattan for suspected shoplifting. The store associate found a $44.50 pair of skinny jeans in Rodriquez’s canvass bag, together with a black plastic bag that emitted a “strong odor.” Rodriguez’s bag contained a dead baby.

Rodriguez reportedly told police that she had suffered a miscarriage when she was six months pregnant and had not known what to do with the fetus. But the medical examiner determined that the baby had been born alive, nearly full term at eight months, and that the cause of death may have been asphyxiation.

Tiona Rodriguez’s pic from her Facebook page

John Jalsevac writes for LifeSiteNews, Oct 17, 2013, that that Victoria’s Secret baby is just the tip of a disturbing trend:

[...] what if I told you that this sort of thing is happening routinely, all across the country, as well as in other parts of the world? And that the only reason that it’s making national headlines this time is because the discovery of the baby’s body was at a Victoria Secret store, which gives the story that extra bizarre twist, with just a hint of weird sexuality, that will grab attention?

Take a look at the following list…which is far from complete. I’ve simply compiled some of the most shocking, and most recent incidents. Here are the incidents in just the past eight months or so:

• October 17 – A 17-year-old girl is stopped at a Victoria’s Secret store in Manhattan for suspected shoplifting, and admits that in her bag she has the body of a baby that she gave birth to the day previous.
• October 11 – A newborn baby is found, bleeding but alive, with part of his umbilical cord still attached, abandoned on the concrete in the back yard of a house in Queen’s, New York. The baby survived.
• September 19 – The body of a baby is found at a garbage dump in West Yorkshire, in the United Kingdom.
• August 28 – A woman gives birth in a bar bathroom in Pennsylvania, stuffs the baby in the water tank of a toilet, and then returns to the bar to watch a fight on TV. The body was subsequently discovered by the bar owner.
• August 7 – The body of a baby is discovered at hospital rest room in Texas.
• July 9 – Police discover the body of a baby abandoned in a diaper box in the bushes at a public park in Roseville, California.
• June 21 – The body of a small baby is found in a solid waste tank in a waste disposal plant just north of Montreal. Police say the baby was likely flushed down the toilet.
• June 21  - The body of a newborn baby is discovered in a trash can in Oildale, California.
• June 20 – An Iraqi-born UK woman is found guilty of causing grievous bodily harm after stuffing her baby in a garbage bag and throwing her down a 44 ft. garbage chute.
• June 14 – A garbage truck driver in Thailand sees a small hand emerge from a garbage bag during a pickup. The baby had a balloon tied around her throat.
• June 12 – Brittany Cole is arrested in Altheimer, Arkansas, after dumping her infant son in the trash can. She reportedly told police that she was tired of caring for the baby and could no longer do so.
• June 5 – Twenty-seven-year-old Virginia resident Shavaughn Robinson is charged after allegedly giving birth in a toilet, then placing her daughter in a trash can, and then taking the garbage bag with the baby in it out of the can and tossing it in a dumpster.
• June 4 – A dog discovers a living baby in Thailand that had been placed in a white plastic bag in a dump. The baby, which was premature, survived.
• May 30 – Police announce that charges will not be filed against a Kansas teen who gave birth and dumped the body of her baby in a trash can. The teen claimed the baby was stillborn.
• May 27 – Video footage of firefighters in Jinhua, China, rescuing a baby who had become stuck in a sewage pipe, rockets around the globe. The baby’s mother apparently gave birth on the toilet, and by her own account “accidentally” flushed the baby down the toilet. The mom reportedly hid the pregnancy because the baby was not considered legal under China’s brutal One-Child Policy.
• May 2 - Cherlie Lafleur, 19, is arrested in Pennsylvania after allegedly attempting to flush her newborn baby down the toilet at her school. When that didn’t work, she reportedly deposited the body in the trash can.
• Dec. 10, 2012 – The body of a newborn baby is discovered on the conveyor belt of a garbage sorting facility in La Puente, California.

I’ve been working in the news business for nearly 10 years, and I can’t ever recall a similar string of incidents. [...]

So why is this happening all over the place? Good question. Last month, a prominent Catholic deacon speculated that the rash of such incidents signals the return of the ancient pagan practice of “exposure,” in which parents would simply leave their unwanted newborn babies on a rock or in the wild to die. “It was the Christians who saved [these babies] and transformed those cultures from cultures of death into cultures of life,” wrote Deacon Keith Fournier. However, he said, the rise of the abortion culture seems to be bringing the custom back in an unofficial form, with numerous gruesome stories emerging in recent months of parents unceremoniously discarding their newborn children. “These contemporary examples substitute a trash can or a dumpster for the rock,” Fournier wrote. But, he said, this trend isn’t surprising, since “babies are treated as trash” in abortion clinics across the country.

It’s hard to argue with that logic. Take a look at these other recent incidents:

• May 28, 2013 - Report surfaces from China about how Chinese officials forcibly aborted a mother who was 8-months pregnant, literally “yanking” her baby out of her, and then dumping it in the trash can.
• May 14, 2013 – Three former workers at a Texas abortion clinic run by abortionist Douglas Karpen step forward alleging that babies are routinely murdered after being born alive during failed late-term abortions at Karpen’s clinic.  One of Karpen’s former assistants said the abortionist would even “twist” the babies heads off.
• May 13 – Kermit Gosnell is found guilty of murdering three babies born alive during failed abortions by “snipping” their spinal cords. His former employees alleged that “hundreds” of babies were killed in this way. In some cases their dismembered feet were kept in jars, or their bodies stuffed into plastic containers and stored in the clinic freezer.
• May 8, 2013 – Live Action release undercover footage of renowned late-term abortionist Leroy Carhart telling a woman seeking an abortion that after he kills the baby in her womb, it will soften up like “meat in a crock pot,” before the body of the baby is removed three days later.
• April 29, 2013 – Live Action releases undercover footage of a worker at a late-term abortion facility telling a woman seeking an abortion to just “flush it” if the baby is accidentally born alive during the abortion. “If it comes out, then it comes out. Flush it…if anything, you know, put it in a bag or something or somewhere and bring it to us,” the counselor says.
• April 19, 2013 – A former employee of late-term abortionist Kermit Gosnell testfies in court how on one occasion a fully formed baby was born alive into a toilet. Kareema Cross said the baby was making “swimming motions” as if it was trying to get out. Another of Gosnell’s employees, Adrienne Moton, then took the baby out of the toilet, and slit its spinal cord.

And so as Americans “celebrate” the pagan holiday of Halloween by dressing ourselves as monsters and watching horror movies, just remember that the real monsters are all around and inside us.

~Eowyn