Britain’s Baby Burning

The British public is currently being scandalized by the
revelations that hospitals there have been incinerating the remains of aborted
infants as clinical waste, in some cases doing so to generate electricity for
hospitals. Even in that country which has so steadfastly refused to have the
abortion debate, waves have been caused by the news that in the last two years
alone the bodies of more than 15,000 aborted and miscarried babies were
incinerated by twenty-seven National Health Service trusts. Two used the
remains to burn in waste-to-energy plants that provide power for the hospitals.

How did this happen? By stealth. Britain is
a country where abortion is essentially available on demand, despite the fact
that no law permitting such practices has ever been passed. The 1967 Abortion
Act was only supposed to allow for a termination of pregnancy under such
exceptional circumstances as those that would result in “grave permanent injury to the physical or mental
health of the pregnant woman.” Today almost 190,000 abortions are
performed in Britain annually, most signed off on psychological grounds. Of
these, three thousand are women having their fourth abortion.

The Daily
Telegraph’s Tim Stanley has described the use of the remains of the unborn
to heat hospitals as being “more
akin to cannibalism” than the efficient recycling that
these macabre practices were presumably being justified under. As with
cannibalism we are confronted with the most direct challenge to basic notions
about the dignity of the human form. Is the biological matter that constitutes
a human being so intrinsically devoid of value and meaning that it is
permissible to use this material for some mundane and utilitarian purpose? Many
will feel instinctively sickened by such practices but if presented with
accusations that this is merely irrational sentimentalism, what could any of us
say in the defense of our deepest instincts here?

The bioethicist Leon Kass has spoken in
staunch defense of precisely this kind of instinctive rejection of the
mistreatment of the materials of human life. Responding to the Gosnell case, Kass
has argued for seeing the wisdom in the very sensation of repugnance that we
feel towards such activities. “As pain
is to the body so repugnance is to soul” states Kass. For
as Kass has argued, it is not possible to give full verbal account of the
horror we feel at such things.

What is this underlying insight that we feel
yet struggle to articulate when it comes to the materials of nascent human
life? Kass suggests that although these cellular tissues have not yet achieved
full human flowering, they nevertheless still represent the dignity of human
possibility. It is surely that and the knowledge that this is the material from
which we ourselves emerged that drives our conviction.

The beauty of Kass’s argument may well be
that it has the power to resonate with both believer and atheist alike. Yet, we
are still entitled to ask where religion stands in regards to this most
critical of moral challenges. This in a sense brings us back to the question
about how any of this could have happened in the first place. According to a
Gallup poll 71 percent of British people say that religion does not occupy an
important place in their life. If one were to discount ethnic minorities and
immigrant groups then that figure would doubtlessly be considerably higher.

For all the high-minded notions about human
rights that are prevalent in British society, it would appear that this has
been no substitute for religion when it comes to protecting human dignity. The
reality is that much of British society inhabits a paradigm in which,
fundamentally, nothing is true and everything is permitted.

Tom Wilson is a British-born writer and
political analyst. He is currently a fellow at the Tikvah Fund in New
York. 

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