September 5, 2013 ( LifeSiteNews.com ) – The ongoing rash of babies being flushed down toilets, abandoned in dumpsters, or thrown into trash cans signals the return of an ancient pagan practice completely compatible with our abortion culture, according to a prominent Catholic deacon.

“This situation amounts to a modern resurgence of the ancient pagan practice once called exposure,” wrote Deacon Keith Fournier in a recent article. “Unwanted babies were left out on rocks to be eaten by birds of prey or taken by slave traders.”

That brutal cultural indifference came to an end with the rise of a new faith. “It was the Christians who saved [these babies] and transformed those cultures from cultures of death into cultures of life,” wrote Fournier.

Now, paganism is resurgent, and its anti-life ethic with it.

Deacon Fournier's article was inspired by the story of a premature baby with tissues stuffed up its nose who was found in a dumpster outside a New Jersey apartment building Saturday afternoon.

That baby boy was found in time and is now in stable condition at a Jersey City hospital. Most victims of modern day exposure are not so lucky.

On Sunday, a garbage worker found a discarded baby's body in a garbage dump in Phuket, Thailand.

In the last month, dead babies have been discarded from Greece to the United Arab Emirates, and domestically from Louisville, Kentucky, to a Pennsylvania city named Bethlehem.

Click "like" if you want to end abortion!

“These contemporary examples substitute a trash can or a dumpster for the rock,” Fournier wrote.

This summer alone, the phenomenon has been seen from California to Virginia, to England and Spain.

The rebirth of the culture of death is seen most clearly, not in exposure, but in abortion, he said.

“It is time to be brutally honest. Every procured abortion kills a child through the injection of poison, saline burning, the collapsing of their skull, or the severing of their limbs - and we do not hear about it,” Deacon Keith Fournier wrote. “We have closed our eyes to the truth of what is going on in our nation.”

“Babies are treated as trash” in abortion facilities nationwide, he said.

Abortion workers have been caught on undercover video telling women that if they give birth to a baby before their scheduled abortion, they should “flush it down the toilet.”

Deacon Fournier hoped that base cruelty such as this will shock the national conscience back – and spur Americans into action.

“Stories like the one out of Jersey City call us to examine what we are becoming as a result,” he wrote. “We are killing our children based upon the sole criteria of convenience and whether they are wanted. That is the true effect of legal abortion on demand.”

“We must take up the task of rescuing” all babies “in this hour,” he wrote. “Not only are they losing their lives, we are losing our national soul.”