A documentary on Monday by Channel 4‘s Dispatches revealed that ten NHS trusts have admitted to burning the remains of unborn babies as ‘clinical waste’ and that two other trusts have burned foetal remains in ‘waste-to-heat’ energy plants to heat hospitals.
These were not isolated occurrences. The programme revealed that at least 15,500 babies were incinerated by 27 NHS trusts over the past two years; Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge alone incinerated 797 foetuses below 13 weeks of gestation as part of their waste-to-energy scheme.
Another of these energy facililities at Ipswich hospital incinerated 1,101 foetal remains between 2011 and 2013.
Comparisons with the Shoah, the 1985 French documentary film about the Holocaust, are not so far off the mark given that many of the babies had been aborted.
Never mind lampshades, using the corpses of the unwanted, surplus-to requirement humans to generate light and heat would undoubtedly have been a flagship Nazi policy had the technology been available, reaching the epitome of ruthless efficiency.
The response of the health minister Dr Dan Poulter, who says the practice is unacceptable and pledges to stamp it out within the NHS, nonetheless exposed society’s schizophrenic attitude towards the unborn.
It is telling that the main reaction from Prof Sir Mike Richards, Chief Inspector of Hospitals, was one of disappointment that trusts may not have been informing or consulting women and their families, than one of concern about the callous disregard for human life.
I experienced a miscarriage a few months ago. By tragic coincidence our baby would have been due a few hours after the programme was aired and it therefore had particular resonance.
We experienced similar insensitivity from hospital staff who did not offer us any choice in terms of the disposal of our baby’s remains, who in clear breach of their policies automatically presented us with a consent form for mass cremation.
When we asked whether or not the hospital may be able to store the remains for a brief period in order that we could arrange a private burial, we were told that this would not be possible and were given the intact body to take home and refrigerate in a sample pot.
To add insult to injury, the relevant paperwork relating to our baby had various sections crossed out and replaced by a scrawled sentence specifically referring to our alleged wish to take home the ‘products of conception’, as though we had a macabre wish to display them on the mantelpiece like a removed appendix!
It is troubling that reason for the current furore is not due to the lack of dignity and respect for the babies themselves.
It is only due to the sensitivities of grieving parents who understandably cannot bear to think of their children being cremated alongside soiled gloves and dressings.
Once again the vocal media feminists reveal their cognitive dissonance in their silence, as in the case of gendercide.
I wonder how many champions for choice would be relaxed about their aborted foetuses being used as a renewable energy source. Just imagine the liberal outrage if this were puppies or kittens?
The private abortion providers such as Marie Stopes and BPAS must be squirming in their seats as these revelations raise the issue of precisely how they process the many hundreds of thousands of foetal remains they deal with year in and year out.
Are they similarly treated as clinical waste and incinerated alongside the soiled swabs?
If this practice is unacceptable in NHS hospitals, why should it be tolerated in abortion clinics?
All in all it raises some very uncomfortable questions about the nature of human life and why one set of human remains should be treated in a sensitive and compassionate fashion, while another is burnt with the rubbish.
Why are unborn babies only to be accorded dignity if they are wanted by their parents? No wonder those involved in abortion use contrived euphemisms to disguise its inevitable consequence, namely the unpalatable existence of a deceased baby.
Heaven forfend that abortion clinics should be forced to come into line with NHS policy, install separate incinerators or use third party crematoria.
After all that would cost money, make a considerable impact upon profits and worse still admit the inherent humanity of the unborn child.
With 185,000 abortions performed on demand in the UK every year, that would never do at all.
