Stu Bykofsky: Someone steps forward to care for the tiny dead

SOMEONE CARES about the butchered babies.

Their mothers didn't care. Neither did their "doctor." Nor city and state officials.

The district attorney cares now, but it is too late for the butchered babies and a couple of dead mothers.

D.A. Seth Williams wants to send the "doctor," Kermit Gosnell, to jail - at least. The kind of late-term abortions that he did - even if performed properly - are illegal in Pennsylvania. If "Doctor" Gosnell is guilty of one-tenth of what he's charged with, he is going to hell.

Rachael Tennyson Gallagher cares, and e-mailed me, saying that she wanted to respectfully bury the babies, the pieces of their bodies that remain, to show them the shred of decency that they never knew when their lives were extinguished like wax candles.

Rachael asked me if that was possible.

It was, but first I want you to know about Rachael.

She has a couple of farms in Chester County, where she boards and trains horses, and lives with her husband, Michael, and their four sons, all of whom are adopted.

She and Michael are white, none of their sons is. The skin color of their sons - Emerson, 12; Max, 11; Pablo, 10; and Aiden, 10 - matters as little to her as the color of her horses, some of which she has ridden to blue ribbons in show-jumping in the hunter division at the Devon Horse Show.

"Being the mother of four boys," she wrote to me, "I value and love all babies as if they were my own."

When we then spoke by phone, Rachael told me of her desire to arrange a proper funeral for the - what are they? Rachael says "babies," maybe the law says "fetuses," the D.A. says "evidence" and I say "proof" of some peoples' moral rot.

I asked Rachael, who turns 48 on Saturday, if she knew how much a funeral would cost. She didn't, but felt that she could afford it. If not, she'd hold fundraisers and ask for donations from friends.

"I could get one coffin. The babies could all be put together," she said.

No, she's not a religious zealot. Sundays, she's usually working with or showing her horses rather than going to church. She declined to say anything about abortion, pro or con. That's not her issue. The butchered babies are her issue.

"I know what people have to go through to get a child of their own," she said.

The babies, now in the Medical Examiner's Office, "had no respect, they had no one to love them, they had no future."

I called the D.A., who told me that the Archdiocese of Philadelphia already had offered to bury the "evidence," when it can be released by the courts.

Auxiliary Bishop John McIntyre - who told me that he cannot recall "a case as heinous as this" - said that this offer is a first for the church, one that will "provide a dignified burial for these babies" in a Catholic cemetery.

Once the bodies are released, the church will determine if it will use a single casket, but lacks enough information to decide now, McIntyre said. A Mass is "certainly a possibility."

If there were to be a Mass, it would be public and Rachael would attend, she said.

Then this nonreligious woman asked if she could make a donation to the church to help with the burial. It is something she wants to do.

McIntyre said, "We could set something up if they wished to help with this for the burial and for a stone, a marker."

When the time is right, I hope the church invites donations for the burial and a stone monument. I know others would want to open their wallets, as they opened their hearts, to the babies who were butchered.

E-mail stubyko@phillynews.com or call 215-854-5977. See Stu on Facebook. For recent columns:

http://go.philly.com/byko.