THE BUCKET LIST

It was December, 1989…. just a normal Friday evening at a home in Houston, Texas. Chad Traywick and his wife, Darda, had just driven up in their truck …and found themselves immediately surrounded by police, the SWAT team and a van from the coroner's office.



Chad and Darda were pulled from their vehicle and patted down. They were then informed by Det. John Hill that the police wanted to search the house.


A local photo-finishing store had called police to report they had developed photos from film that Chad had dropped off of a beheaded and mutilated newborn baby.


The police and the SWAT team were prepared to arrest suspected satanic cult members –


Except, upon entering the house, instead evidence of child sacrifice, they found pro-life religious posters and books.


They confronted Chad….his story unfolded.


Chad Traywick had recently become active in the pro-life movement.   At 3 o'clock Saturday afternoon he went to the WOMEN’S PAVILION, a local abortion clinic, to determine a location for conducting a picket at the facility.


Chad found that no one was in the building and that the door was open. He went in. The waiting areas were attractive and the operating rooms were quite clean.


But as he continued to explore he came upon a small back room filled with 15 plastic buckets with lids on. He realized what the contents might be and, taking one of the larger buckets, he quickly left.

 Darda and a friend videotaped and photographed his opening of the container.


What was inside the bucket was horrifying.  The contents appeared to be a full-grown baby boy. His head and right arm had been ripped from his body and his brain removed. The baby had bitten through his own tongue, no doubt while his head, grasped by forceps, was being literally ripped off his body. The baby’s body had an incision where other organs had apparently been removed .


Chad Traywick took the film to a one-hour photo developer. He said, "I explained to them that the pictures were of an aborted baby and asked if they would have any problem or felt uncomfortable developing them."


The clerk said there would be no problem. But when he returned for the developed pictures the clerk was quite nervous. The photographs were so terrible that the clerk had called the police to investigate what appeared to be an appalling crime. The police had only to look at the photos… for them, that was enough.


Once the police had been given his explanation Chad, on December 15th,1989, agreed to make a statement at police headquarters about what had occurred.. He was not the baby’s killer.


A neighbor shared more information. After describing the events surrounding Chad’s arrest, he  commented, as he looked at the pictures of Baby David, that this wasn’t the only time he had seen a mutilated baby like this.


He went on to declare that he had once worked for the City of Houston’s water treatment plant. One of his jobs was to clean the screen that filtered the effluent as it came into the facility. Quite often he would remove babies from the screen, particularly on Saturdays (when most abortions are performed). Their ultimate lot, he testified, were to be thrown into a large grinder.


Chad named the baby boy David and on Jan. 20, 1990, he buried him after a memorial service attended by over 100 people. That was 21 years ago.

We are now at the 38th anniversary of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade abortion decision and not much has changed. There continue to be babies in buckets… the horror that was revealed this week in Philadelphia gives proof to that.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell

I used to believe in a "fundamental constitutional right," "a private decision between a woman and her doctor," "a woman's right to choose" and other noble sounding euphemisms.  But then I was confronted with what that "choice" really meant.... Baby David and millions like him….are the result of "choice." ………


 Baby David, a 28-week-old ( 7 months) "fetus" aborted at the Women's Pavilion, a Houston, Texas, abortion clinic. He was 16-inches long and underwent a D&E abortion, where limbs are ripped off one by one.


Other babies are scraped, cut up, , vacuumed, ripped apart, and chemically burned (Google the term “candy apple baby”). Some have their skulls crushed and their brains sucked out. One can summon these images on the Internet within seconds.  Pieces of baby.  I recommend caution…they are not for the faint of heart….and they might …if nothing else…give one a great deal to think about.  They just might even make one shift a paradigm.


Consider the many millions of American children of all races and ethnicities… gone… out of our lives in the name of the Constitution, choice and freedom.

This is now a 38 year long struggle.  The debate over abortion continues because so many know, in their heart of hearts, that it is not right. And I am convinced that many who continue to support its Constitutionality have never seen the Baby Davids. They have never looked at the contents of the buckets. I know I had not.

 I now look forward to the day when we, as a society, declare that these small lives are valuable and that we do not, when our daughters “make a mistake”, consider them, in the words of President Obama, “punished with a baby. "

I am reminded of the gypsy in Verdi's opera Il Trovatore.   Outraged by the count's cruel injustice, she stole his infant son and, in a crazed act of vengeance, flung him into the fire.... Or so she thought.  For, in turning around, she discovered the count's son lay safe on the ground behind her; it was her own son she had thrown into the flames.

Abortion can present itself as sparkling liberty,  a way to cast off the shackles of being female.  That illusion lasts only until you realize who it was you threw into the inferno.

The Man In The Crowd

It was morning, September 5, 1901. At the gates of the Pan-American exposition in Buffalo, New York stood a slight young man.

He was nondescript…just part of the crowd. He bought his ticket to the Grandest Of All World's Fairs.

 He passed through the gates, and began a slow assessment of the Exposition grounds. He attended particularly to the layout of the walkways, the throngs of people, and the security guards.

Then this man found what he sought. A huge crowd had gathered to hear a speech delivered by then President William McKinley – maybe a fortunate few would be granted the opportunity to greet the President personally and shake his hand.

 The man approached the throng of people waiting to glimpse the President. This man found himself, after a long wait, close enough to hear McKinley's speech.

The President rose and mounted the stand. The man pushed his way down to the front row and stood with the cheering people….. but he said nothing.

 McKinley’s speech was of no importance. His goal was to get closer to the President but a guard appeared in front of him and blocked his chance.


Hundreds of people attempted to crowd up to the President's carriage after his address. The man was among them but he was forced back. The President drove away unaware of the man in the crowd left to cursed his bad luck.


The slight man returned to the Pan-American Exposition the next day. He awaited President McKinley’s return. The President was scheduled to greet people in the Temple of Music and the man was one of the first to enter.

 When the President entered the Temple through a side door the man had positioned himself as close to the stage as possible.. The man hurried forward when the President prepared to shake hands with the people.

Warmly, with a smile on his face, the President took their hands. He gave a sharp downward jerk to each person's hand as he greeted them.   Patiently, the man waited his turn to approach the President.


None noticed or remarked upon the fact that his hand was wrapped in a handkerchief and held close to his chest. It might have been an injury he was protecting.

 The man reached the President. Without looking at McKinley’s face he extended his left hand as the smiling President reached out to take the man's right hand. The man pressed his hand against the President's chest and fired the gun he was concealing under the handkerchief. He fired twice, and would have fired again if not for the fact that he was tackled and driven to the ground.

The crowd exploded in the Temple of Music. President McKinley fell back into the arms of one of the security guards. He was gripping his chest. Blood was rapidly pooling on his white shirt.

 "Am I shot?" he asked. And the guard replied, "I'm afraid that you are, Mr. President."


Immediately the assassin was tackled by secret service men and his weapon was torn from his hand by a squad of Exposition police.


He was beaten severely by Soldiers of the U.S. artillery who were present at the reception.


"Go easy on him boys." McKinley, slumped on the floor in terrible pain, whispered.


"My wife, be careful about her. Don't let her know."

As word of the assassination attempt spread out of the Temple of Music, a riot ensued from the thousands in attendance.

There was an immediate cry for the death of the assassin at their hands as people shoved their way into the Temple..


The scene got more and more out of control and the military was called upon to try and restore some order. The Pan-American Exposition police attempted to get the assassin off the grounds.


The assassin lay on the floor near where McKinley was dying


The President raised he right hand, red with his own blood, and placed it on the hand of his secretary. "Let no one hurt him," he gasped, and sank back into a chair. The man was carried away by the guards.


"What is your name?" asked the District Attorney.


"Leon Czolgosz." was the weak reply. ( pronounced choll-gosh)

"Did you mean to kill the President?" asked the D.A.


"I did."

"What was the motive that induced you to commit this crime?"


"I am a disciple of Emma Goldman ( a leading Anarchist).

I killed the President because I done my duty. I did not feel that one man should have all this power while others have none."

On Saturday, September 14, Theodore Roosevelt received a telegram from John Hay . It read, “The President Died at Two-Fifteen This Morning.”

In the company of Senator Mark Hanna, his friend and political manager, the President died. His last words were lines from his favorite hymn, “Nearer My God to Thee.”

Physician Heal Thy Self

In 1847, Jakob Kolletschka, a close friend of Hungarian doctor, Ignaz Semmelweis, cut his finger while he was doing an autopsy.  Kolletschka soon died of symptoms like those of puerperal fever.





 "There is not a corner in Britain where this formidable disease has not made many mourners,” John Mackintosh, an Edinburgh, Scotland "man-midwife" wrote of puerperal or "childbed" fever in the 1820s.


This bacterial disease of the upper genital tract typically began within the first three days after childbirth with abdominal pain, fever and respiratory difficulty, and very often ended with the new mother's death.


Medical writers had been remarking on childbed fever at least since Hippocrates, but in the early modern era, it began to attract attention for a number of reasons. For one, it began to appear in epidemics, with very high mortality rates. For another, accounts of outbreaks were written about and published.

 There were terrible epidemics of puerperal fever in the German city of Leipzig in 1652 and 1665, at the Hôtel Dieu in Paris, France, in 1745 and 1746, and at the British Lying-In Hospital in London, England, in 1760.


In 1847, one of every six women whose babies were delivered by the medical students and supervising doctors at Allgemeine Krankenhaus (General Hospital) in Vienna died of puerperal fever.



Dr. Semmelweis



The death rate consumed Dr. Semmelweis. He could not figure it out.


A nearby obstetric hospital, run by midwives, lost only two percent of its patients to fever.

 Not only was the incidence of this disease in women delivered by hospital midwives dramatically lower but puerperal fever was quite rare when mothers had their babies born at home.

 While a few physicians (most notably Alexander Gordon and Oliver Wendell Holmes) realized that childbed fever was a contagious process,  it was Ignáz Semmelweis who identified the nature of the problem as stemming from the failure of obstetricians and medical students to wash their hands and change their clothing, especially after performing autopsies or doing surgery.

Semelweiss concluded that some unknown "cadaveric material" caused childbed fever.


No one had connected germs with disease yet. The first hint of that connection would come from England six years later and Joseph Lister would not demonstrate how to kill germs for another 18 years.

People, in the 1800s, found their way to the surgical ward of a hospital by following the smell of rotting flesh. Doctors saw no need to wash their hands between patients or after autopsies.


In fact, an apron covered in layers of gore was thought to show how important and busy a doctor was. And instruments, of course, weren't washed between patients either.


On a hunch, Semmelweis set up a policy. Doctors must wash their hands in a chlorine solution when they leave the cadavers and surgery and before examining any woman in labor.

 Mortality from puerperal fever promptly dropped to two percent.

 But instead of reporting his success at a meeting, Semmelweis said nothing. Finally, a friend published two papers on the method. By then, Semmelweis had started washing medical instruments as well as hands.

As outside interest grew, Semmelweis's silence became understandable . The hospital director felt his leadership had been criticized. He was furious. He blocked Semmelweis's promotion. The situation got worse. Viennese doctors turned on him.

 Finally, he went back to Budapest. There he brought his methods to a far more primitive hospital. He cut death by puerperal fever to less than one percent. He did more. He systematically isolated causes of death. He autopsied victims. He set up control groups. He studied statistics.

 He lectured publicly about his results in 1850, however, the reception by the medical community was cold, if not hostile. His observations went against the current scientific opinion of the time, which blamed diseases on an imbalance of the basic "humours" in the body.

 It was also argued that even if his findings were correct, washing one's hands each time before treating a pregnant woman, as Semmelweis advised, would be too much work. Nor were doctors eager to admit that they had caused so many deaths.


Semmelweis spent 14 years developing his ideas and lobbying for their acceptance, culminating in a book he wrote in 1861.


The medical establishment gave it poor reviews. Semmelweis grew angry and polemical. He hurt his own cause with rage and frustration.

 In 1865 he suffered a mental breakdown. Friends committed him to a mental institution.

There – at the age of 47 -- he cut his finger.

 In days, he was dead...... of the very infection that killed his friend Kolletschka...... and from which he had saved thousands of mothers.


That same year Joseph Lister began spraying a carbolic acid solution during surgery to kill germs. In the end, it was Lister who gave this hero his due. He said, "Without Semmelweis, my achievements would be nothing."