I came across this interesting bit from the New York Times during my regular blog reading today. Apparently, a catholic church in Colorado is holding funerals for and interring the remains of aborted fetuses.
Since 1996, the Sacred Heart of Mary Roman Catholic Church has been holding private funeral ceremonies for aborted fetuses, interring the cremated remains in the churchyard near a monument to the souls of lost infants. Many members of the parish knew of the practice, but the broader world, including the abortion clinic that was the source of the remains and the women whose fetuses had been aborted, apparently did not.
On Sunday, the veil was lifted. The press was invited. Photographers crowded around as the ashes of 300 to 500 fetuses were buried with a hand trowel. A church bell tolled in the distance.
… Since the burials began, the church has received most of the ashes of the aborted fetuses from a mortuary that was hired by an abortion clinic to dispose of them. That source ended late last week when news of what the church had been doing with the remains became public.
Ms. Stafford said the burial ceremonies for the remains of the fetuses were well within the law.
“The church was told it was receiving human medical waste,” said Ms. Stafford, who identified herself as an abortion opponent. “The collision course issue here is the definition of human.”
…The church had been planning to bury up to 1,000 fetuses on Sunday. But after the first reports appeared in the local newspapers last week, the mortuary that had supplied the ashes requested that the remains of several hundred fetuses from abortions that were performed in November be returned. Church leaders said they returned the ashes on Saturday.
The Associated Press reported that Dr. Warren Hern, the director of the clinic where the fetuses were aborted, had not known of the mortuary’s arrangement with the church and that he said his contract required the mortuary to bury the ashes in its own plot.
Kate Horle, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, told the news agency that some of the clinic’s patients had been devastated by the news.
There’s an aspect to this story that strikes me as bizarre, but then I’ve never quite been able to understand some people’s fetish for the unborn and their unconcern for the already-born. Though, to be fair, I don’t know what charitable programs the church in question might also operate. Actually, it’s someting that George Lakoff writes about in Moral Politics, which I’ve just finished reading, and may review here once I wrap my brain around all the concepts he brings up.
This business having funerals and burials for aborted (and miscarried) fetuses seems to me to be another brilliant act of framing the issue of abortion in a way that makes it difficult for progressives to argue. On the surface, it seems like a compassionate act, but it also serves to humanize aborted fetuses. It’s not entirely foolproof, however, because they still have to wrestle with unwieldy terms like “human medical waste” and because the idea of the funerals seem to “creep out” a significant number of people.
It all just seems a little weired to me. On the whole, I’m in favor of freedom of reproductive choice for women, because I want the women in my life and the women I care about to have a safe option available to them should they need it, and for a host of other reasons. I’m not entirely sure how I feel personally about abortion, but the reality is that I’ll never have to decide whether to have one or not. So, I say leave it legal, keep it safe, and let women decide for themselves.
