The recent “shocking” discovery of the remains of 2,246 human fetuses at the home of Indiana abortion doctor Ulrich Klopfer is indeed horrifying, ghastly, and above all utterly heartbreaking. But it is not shocking.

Our abortion culture has so dehumanized the “unwanted” pre-born child that we can't be surprised when their remains are treated disrespectfully. The societal disregard for the dignity of unborn lives has wrought a predictable end.

“Fetal remains" are what remains after an abortion. It's always true that a little human body emerges after a successful abortion, given the scientific fact that every abortion removes a tiny, developing human from his or her mother. Do those expressing shock have so little imagination that they have never wondered what becomes of these fetal remains?

In the logic of the pro-choice movement, the fetus is immaterial, so how could there be anything disturbing about the discovery of Klopfer’s stash of over 2,000 preserved fetal remains? In fact, to maintain the irrelevancy of the fetus, abortion industry leader Planned Parenthood has fought any regulation of the matter all the way to the Supreme Court, in a case originating in Indiana. The pro-choice community was rife with ridicule for then-Gov. Mike Pence when he signed a bill requiring the respectful treatment and burial of fetal remains. Pro-choice advocates called the bill “extreme” and “truly bizarre,” among other far more crude epitaphs. But now Pence looks prescient in seeing a need for this law.

The Supreme Court recently upheld this provision of the Indiana law over the objection of Planned Parenthood, saying that the state has a legitimate interest in the disposal of fetal remains. The implementation of this law came too late, however, for Klopfer’s tiny victims.

In the pro-choice calculus, neither is there room for the other casualty of their mindset: the suffering of women who have had abortions. There is zero acknowledgment of post-abortion syndrome, regret, or depression in abortion’s aftermath. The thousands of women who were ill-treated in Klopfer’s unsanitary clinics are victims as well. It is especially heartrending to wonder what their painful thoughts might be upon hearing of this grisly discovery at their doctor’s home.

At least one young mother is publicly wondering if one of those tiny bodies is her child’s. She was only 13 when Klopfer performed an abortion on her, a procedure she now says she never would have undergone if she’d had the maturity to understood what it entailed. In a press conference this week, she called for DNA testing in an attempt to recover the remains of her little one for a proper burial.

There is nothing new under the sun. In the wake of Roe v. Wade, our cultural disregard for the dignity of human life quickly led to ghoulish research on fetal tissue from aborted babies. The argument that it would be foolish to “waste” the body of an aborted fetus even led to taxpayer-sponsored aborted fetal tissue research. Planned Parenthood quickly got in on the trade as a supplier of fetal body parts. An undercover investigation recorded Planned Parenthood doctors talking callously about collecting babies' hearts, livers, thymus and more for the macabre marketplace of trafficked baby body parts.

Was Klopfer’s preservation of fetuses really so different from the fetuses preserved in Planned Parenthood clinics for shipping to laboratories?

Our media culture perpetuates a conspiracy of silence on what remains after an abortion. The presidential candidates are rightly asked frequently about their proposals to address gun violence and the tragic deaths of children in school shootings. There have been 64 children who died in school shootings between 2012 and 2018. Why are there no questions from most media outlets about over 2,000 little bodies found in an eerie mass grave-type shrine at the home of an abortion doctor? Why did it take the presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, where Klopfer operated one of his clinics, five days to publicly discuss this disturbing issue?

The shocker in this story is this: Pro-choice advocates maintain their cognitive dissonance in the face of this reality. They are utterly divorced from the truth of what abortion actually is. These fetal remains, these tiny human bodies, cry out to us to recognize the tragic nature of our abortion culture.

Maureen Ferguson is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. She is a senior policy adviser for The Catholic Association.