The remains of 2,411 aborted fetuses discovered in a physician's garage and car in Illinois will be memorialized at a graveside service in a South Bend, Indiana, cemetery on Wednesday, the .
The grisly discovery was made not long after Ulrich Klopfer, DO, one of the Midwest's most prolific abortion doctors, died on Sept. 3, 2019. His family, who claimed to have no knowledge of Klopfer's collection, reported their find to authorities.
Remains were sealed in individual bags, stashed inside more than at his home near Joliet, Illinois. Some were also found that was parked in a different location.
Illinois officials said the remains were from abortions performed from the early 2000s in Indiana. They turned them over to Indiana officials, who said the remains couldn't be identified.
Klopfer reportedly performed tens of thousands of abortions over several decades. He ran abortion clinics in Fort Wayne, Gary, and South Bend, Indiana -- the hometown of Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, who recently served as its mayor.
He sometimes was the only abortion doctor in those cities, , which often led to clashes with pro-life activists. At one point, Allen County Right to Life moved its headquarters next to his Fort Wayne clinic. But Klopfer continued to champion women's access to abortions in Indiana, a state that has some of the country's toughest restrictions on the procedure.
"If men got pregnant and women didn't, this wouldn't be a discussion," the AP quoted Klopfer as saying.
Klopfer complained that conservative state officials worked with anti-abortion groups to shut him down. The last of his three clinics closed in 2015, and his medical license was revoked in 2016 for not exercising "reasonable care" and violating documentation requirements, from that time.
Though Klopfer hasn't been viewed as a murderer like the notorious abortion doctor -- who was convicted in 2013 for killing three babies born alive -- questions had been raised about his ethics over the course of his career.
In one instance that was brought up during his medical board hearing, Klopfer said he performed an abortion on a 10-year old girl who was raped by her uncle and never reported the incident to police, effectively helping her family cover up the crime. He also performed abortions on two 13-year-olds without reporting the procedures to authorities.
Klopfer was born in Dresden, Germany, in 1940 and survived the notorious Allied firebombing attack in 1945. , from Fort Wayne, told the Associated Press that the event seemed to have stuck with Klopfer: "I thought his abortions, how he kept the fetuses, might be unconscious revenge for the bombings."