Thousands of fetal remains found in Illinois are buried in Indiana: ‘Horrifying to anyone with normal sensibilities’

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The remains of more than 2,000 fetal remains that were discovered in the Illinois home of one of the Midwest’s most prolific abortion doctors received a mass burial Wednesday at a cemetery in Indiana.

Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill, a Republican, spoke after the burial at Southlawn Cemetery in South Bend, telling a crowd that the remains’ discovery was "horrifying to anyone with normal sensibilities."

Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill speaks at a burial service, Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2020, at Southlawn Cemetery in South Bend, Ind., for the more than 2,400 fetal remains found at the home of an abortion doctor.  (South Bend Tribune via AP)

Wednesday's service came five months after relatives sorting through Dr. Ulrich Klopfer's belongings following his Sept. 3 death came across 2,246 sets of preserved fetal remains stacked floor to ceiling in his garage in a suburb of Chicago. 165 more were later found in a trunk of a car at a Chicago-area business where Klopfer kept vehicles.

Hill said the fetal remains resulted from abortions Klopfer had performed at his Indiana clinics in the early 2000s but had "ghoulishly packed up and stored away in his garage" and "callously discarded in the trunk of his car for nearly two decades."

"The shocking discovery of 2,411 medically preserved fetal remains in Illinois, left in a garage and in the trunk of a car, was horrifying to anyone with normal sensibilities," Hill said, adding that the remains had now received "an appropriate resting place."

Following the service, many of those who gathered at the cemetery prayed, sang songs and listened to remarks by anti-abortion activists, the South Bend Tribune reported.

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Klopfer, who was 79, performed tens of thousands of abortions over 40 years, mainly in Indiana -- a state with some of the nation's toughest anti-abortion laws -- and was often as the only abortion doctor serving South Bend, Gary and Fort Wayne. He was a reviled figure among anti-abortion activists, who held weekly demonstrations outside his now-shuttered clinics.

Klopfer's medical license was suspended in 2016 by Indiana regulators who cited shoddy record keeping and substandard patient monitoring. Klopfer alleged that conservative state officials were in cahoots with anti-abortion groups to close him down.

Hill said in a message posted on his office's Facebook page along with a video of his remarks that the remains "were senselessly hoarded by Dr. Ulrich Klopfer after he performed the abortions."

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Hill's office continues to investigate the fetal remains, after releasing a preliminary report in December on the discovery of the remains in Illinois and thousands of abandoned patient medical records found at Klopfer's former Indiana clinics and other properties.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.