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The Delaware pro-life community is set to gather at a Wilmington cemetery Oct. 18 for an annual memorial for 63 aborted children, and this year the community will also pay tribute to the late pro-life advocate who helped give the children a loving burial in 1988.
Members of the Knights of Columbus and Delaware Right to Life will attend the memorial at Cathedral Cemetery, where there will be a prayer service in memory of the aborted children, according to Wilmington diocesan newspaper The Dialog.
The children are buried together under a headstone that the Knights of Columbus donated in 1988, according to Moira Sheridan, president of Delaware Right to Life (DRL). Sheridan told CatholicVote in an Oct. 17 email statement that the pro-life community comes together every year to honor them and that this year’s memorial is officially dedicated to Dolores “Dee” Becker, the woman who began the memorial.
Sheridan explained that in 1988, local pro-lifers in Chicago rescued the bodies of hundreds of aborted babies that had been dumped onto a loading dock from being destroyed as “medical waste.” A Dec. 16, 1988 newspaper report from the Dialog about the funeral explains that the fetal children’s remains “were found among thousands of others in plastic bags, labeled with their states of origin,” and 63 of the babies were from Delaware. The bags included the dates of the abortion and the mothers’ names. Upon rescuing the bodies, local pro-lifers contacted various pro-life leaders about having a burial service, according to Sheridan.
They asked Becker, who at the time was vice president of the National March for Life and had founded DRL, to participate in a burial service in Pennsylvania for the children, according to the Dialog. In response, Becker asked if the Delaware pro-life community could bury the aborted children from the state.
Becker then arranged a Mass and burial for the children, Sheridan said.
“A single white casket was donated by a local funeral director and the procession wended its way through the streets of Wilmington to Cathedral Cemetery, located in the city of Wilmington,” Sheridan said.
A police escort and the Knights of Columbus color guard participated in the funeral. Sheridan said the event “caught the attention of the local media, who praised this ‘wise and wonderful’ woman for this final gesture of respect. It was perhaps the one and only time that opposing forces came together in this way.”
In a Dec. 16, 1988, Dialog article about the burial, Becker herself had commented on the importance of the public ceremony.
“We want to give the service respect and dignity, as if we were burying our own children,” said Becker, who had seven children and 10 grandchildren. “It’s very, very sad. I can’t imagine losing one of my own.”
She stressed to the outlet that Christians are called to bury the dead and call attention to the tragedy of abortion.
This year’s service will have a ceremony memorializing Becker, who died in 2020, according to an Oct. 14 Dialog report.
Sheridan recalled that Becker’s efforts to found DRL came after the state passed a pro-abortion law.
“She vowed she would ‘never give up on the babies,’” Sheridan said.
Becker – whom she hailed as “tireless, fearless, and a born leader” founded the organization at her kitchen table while raising her children, Sheridan explained. The late advocate also started the Delaware Pro-Life Coalition.
“She never gave up on her vow to God,” Sheridan said. Throughout her life, Becker advocated for the dignity of the unborn, went on to speak at many March for Life events and participated in social and religious work, according to her obituary. A 2020 report from the Dialog related that she and her husband were devout Catholics. She received the designation of Dame Commander in the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, Wilmington Diocese during Pope St. John Paul II’s pontificate.
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