It turns out that several hospitals in the UK, including Addenbrooke's in Cambridge, incinerated the remains of thousands of miscarried and aborted unborn children as clinical waste, while two of the hospitals used the fetal remains to heat their hospitals. The parents of miscarried babies were told that their child was "cremated," rather than having done what the parents wanted done with the remains.
While many of us find this abhorrent, it really shouldn't surprise us that hospitals would do this, as this is just a logical outgrowth of the pro-choice position, that preborn human beings don't have any rights. If you don't have any rights, your remains don't have to be respected. The only thing that makes this wrong, in the eyes of the pro-choice crowd, is the fact that they went against the parents' wishes. But to those of us who believe that all human beings have basic rights, this practice is despicable.
The NHS has put a ban on the procedure, but why bother if the life of the unborn child is of not enough value to protect them in law? If the unborn don't have rights to protect, then there is no reason to respect their remains. Nevertheless, I do hope that people will recognize that this visceral reaction they are feeling to using aborted and miscarried children to heat hospitals is an indication that maybe the procedure of abortion isn't as morally justifiable as they believe.
I think the outrage regarding this says a lot about what people really know, deep down, about the personhood of the unborn. People will say that the unborn aren't human. They say that they are just a clump of cells or tissue. But we know better. We don't want their dead bodies treated like other refuse because we know they aren't just trash. This cognitive dissonance - where we rationalize abortion and yet instinctively react to this news with outrage - is very telling.
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"the outrage regarding this says a lot about what people really know, deep down, about the personhood of the unborn"
ReplyDeleteI wish that were true. It's a false dilemma to say that the unborn must either be a person or have no value at all. A deceased dog certainly isn't a person, and people would have problems if dogs were being used to heat the building. So just because people are upset about the unborn being used as fuel, does not mean that they regard the unborn as persons. I've found that on the scale of valuable life, most people regard the unborn's value as something south of a dog's life, but north of a gerbil's. If a woman were to kill a neighbor's dog, most people would want nothing to do with her, and would have no trouble sending her to jail. Contrast that to how we react when a woman has an abortion.
That's true, but if the unborn have no rights when they're alive, then they have no rights when they're dead. Which means that even if we feel a visceral outrage toward what these hospitals were doing, there was nothing actually wrong with it, if we accept the pro-choice premise that the unborn don't have any rights.
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