Although 40 years have passed since her abortion, the woman at the cemetery described a sense of loss and regret that transcends time.

Someone will always be missing, is how Jennifer Shea explained the pain following her decision to terminate an unplanned pregnancy when she was 19 in 1979.

Yet the Chicago-area woman finds some comfort in praying at the site of a simple gray tombstone, which bears the epitaph HOLY INNOCENTS PREBORN CHILDREN OF GOD, at St. Mary Catholic Cemetery in southwest suburban Evergreen Park. It marks a grave where hundreds of human fetal remains were buried in 1987, salvaged by anti-abortion activists from a dumpster behind a now-defunct abortion clinic on Michigan Avenue.

“It’s the least I can do to honor my own lost child, to honor each of those here and to honor God for the mercy and forgiveness he has shown me,” Shea told a crowd of roughly 80 gathered at the gravesite last Saturday for an annual event called the “National Day of Remembrance for Aborted Children.”