WARNING: this article contains descriptions of abortion techniques that some readers may find distressing.
London, England-The UK is in an advanced stage of moral collapse as was seen in a shocking TV documentary aired this week exposing that foetal remains are being incinerated as ‘clinical waste’, many of which are burned in incinerators that produce energy to heat in at least one of the hospitals identified.
The documentary reveals that 27, or 1 in 6 of the National Health Trusts (the hospital bodies responsible for a given region of NHS services) have incinerated a total of 15,000 foetal remains in the past two years. Ten of those trusts burn the remains as clinical waste in the hospital incinerator and 12 others carry out ‘sensitive’ incineration, processing the remains at different times from other ‘waste’ but in the same incinerator.
The program focused on women who had miscarried and what was clear is that not all women were treated with equal compassion. While there are truly good and dedicated people working in the NHS, and we saw women handled with care and sensitivity, others were simply told their babies were incinerated as clinical waste. Aborted foetuses didn’t even get a mention. Since the UK aborts about 185,000 children per year, it is not unreasonable to assume that many of the aborted babies end up in these incinerators as ‘waste’ from other hospitals end up in those with these facilities.
Since the program aired the morass of bureaucracy has shown itself to be thicker than the London Fog that hid Jack the Ripper, making it virtually impossible to ascertain which body is to be held ultimately responsible for regulating what should be clear moral guidance in handling the human remains of tiny babies.
The Human Tissue Authority (HTA) that regulates the removal, storage, use and disposal of human bodies, organs and tissue for a number of scheduled purposes such as research, transplantation, and education and training told me that if fetuses go through a mortuary, is under their remit if a post mortem is performed, despite the fact they have a Code of Practice on their website which deals specifically with ‘disposal following pregnancy loss’. “We don’t know about stuff we don’t know about” I was told by their spokesperson when I asked about the means in place for tracking the remains. She pointed to the National Health Service (NHS), whose spokesperson in turn pointed the finger back at the HTA reminding me that technically the HTA don’t cover every circumstance and the hospitals ”didn’t do anything illegal”. Well that’s all right then.
When this story broke, the Chief Medical Officer and the Undersecretary of State for the Department of Health shot off letters to the HTA stating their expectations that the HTA should take action and deal with the abuses in the system. This is the loathsome sausage making that is bureaucracy – as long as something is being seen to be done about an issue, then we can all relax under the proverbial principle of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, in other words, let’s just stop rocking the boat and we’ll all get along.
This is the way the dance goes in a socialized bureaucratic system – someone, either an investigative journalist or even an internal report by the organization in question discovers abuses.
Departments of the bodies in question, public sector bodies, activist groups and politicians all start pointing fingers, an investigation is commissioned, a report written and new guidelines issued. All remains quiet until the dance cycle begins again with another exposé.
Britain is spiritually sick and we got here by pursuing secular values and taking morality out of the public square. Religion and morality, which deliver an absolute framework against which we can judge an individual and collective sense of right and wrong, have been replaced with a new framework of diversity and relative values, allowing ethical standards to change over time.
Take for example abortion. Supporters have developed a language around it that strives to make evil palatable. ‘Pro- choice’,’ freedom’, ‘my body- my life’ and the tragic stories of rape that justify ending a life is the parlance that obfuscates the reality. The actual practice is never talked about. No doubt the majority of those ‘foetal tissues’ that made their way into those incinerators were little arms and legs and heads of wee babies that got ripped apart in the barbaric practice of suction abortion. Or perhaps they were the victims of the even more barbaric practice of injecting lethal drugs into the heart of a fetus past the official abortion limit of 24 weeks, providing there is sufficient proof that the child will be seriously handicapped and therefore doomed literally for the scrap pile.
How can a society allow, even condone this, and then balk with squeamishness when the disposal of these bodies and body parts are burnt up in an equally barbaric manner? It’s easy – anesthetize a culture to believe that something is what it is not. Abortion is a “choice”, not the taking of life. It is no wonder that dead baby parts become clinical ‘waste’ and treated accordingly. Soon the line blurs between diseased organs, bits of fetuses and the wanted children who tragically died in miscarriage. It all simply becomes stuff to be chucked out.
Facilitating evil has the knock on effect that those that have to deal with the practically of the consequences will harden their hearts. If, as a culture, we dispose of life, what’s the big deal in disposing of some body tissue?
In telling ourselves that life is something we can use or lose, we create a convenient disconnect between the human person and the human body. Think of women, especially in poor countries, who for money, are pumped full of drugs to develop multiple eggs for harvesting, often rendering themselves infertile in the process. Or the laboratories that are happy to get hold of foetuses for research purposes. One of the hospitals in the documentary was found to be holding 85 foetuses without the parent’s knowledge. A spokeswoman for the ProLife Alliance tells me it happens all the time in the UK. She also recalled a meeting some years back when a group of policy makers were considering if the use of the eggs of aborted babies for fertility treatments was viable. The irony is beyond comprehension.
When Pope Benedict XVI came to the UK in 2010, he pleaded with us to put back God, religion and virtue in public debate, because without it, like the Nazis, we stand every chance of reducing man and life to the subjective whim of how we decide to play God. We are well on our way to this path.
