Catherine Glenn Foster, President & CEO of Americans United for Life, writes today in First Things on the grim reality of how abortionists dispose of their victims:
In most jurisdictions, the victims of abortion are denied the dignity of a humane burial or cremation. Once those children’s bodies have been reassembled in bloody pieces on an examining table—for the macabre purpose of ensuring that the abortionist has left no part of the dead child in her mother—that child’s body is unceremoniously sealed up and callously labeled as medical waste. This treatment is itself a tragedy that reflects the dehumanizing logic of abortion culture. Yet it also raises urgent moral questions: What happens to that “medical waste”? And how do we know, precisely, whether the medical waste in our community includes the bodies of the human victims of abortion? …
The CDC’s ambiguous language surrounding medical waste provides further political cover for abortion businesses to dispose of victims as a form of solid waste. CDC guidelines describe medical waste as the equivalent of household waste: “No epidemiological evidence suggests that most of the solid- or liquid wastes from hospitals, other healthcare facilities, or clinical/research laboratories is any more infective than residential waste.” “Precisely defining medical waste,” the guidelines state, “is virtually impossible.” The CDC’s ambiguity, combined with abortion businesses’ lack of oversight in most jurisdictions, means abortion providers are often free to do whatever they want when it comes to the bodies of their victims. …
In 2016, Fox News reported on leaked footage from National Abortion Federation conferences. The footage showed a Michigan abortionist stating that there were “about 45 [abortion] clinics in the Detroit metropolitan area and many of them were using garbage disposals” to dispose of human remains, citing “a 40-year-old law in the state of Michigan that said medical waste was fine to go in the sewer system.” …
Earlier this year, activists from Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU) announced at a press conference that they had recovered the remains of 115 aborted children killed at Washington Surgi-Clinic, an abortion facility in downtown D.C. The bodies of the children, contained in a large box (labeled “Curtis Bay Energy” and “Biohazard”), were allegedly turned over to the activists by an employee of the Curtis Bay medical waste company. Curtis Bay publicly disclosed on its website that it manages “the largest medical waste incinerator in the US” and “utilizes Waste-to-Energy incineration to safely convert infectious/biomedical waste and non-hazardous pharmaceuticals into useful energy.” After PAAU’s press conference, Curtis Bay’s website was scrubbed of any reference to its Waste-to-Energy program. The “Our Process” page now simply references their “sustainable and consistent environmental processing technology.” …
We know that human victims of abortion are treated as medical waste by abortion businesses. We know, too, that medical waste is routinely incinerated, increasingly through “waste-to-energy” initiatives. Abortion businesses are never going to advertise that they dispose of aborted persons as medical waste. Waste disposal companies, for their part, have little incentive to track the precise journey of solid or medical waste originating from abortion businesses, let alone to publicly disclose such information. But lawmakers, regulators, and investigative reporters can and should connect the dots.
This is one of those things no one really wants to think about. But we must think about it, for the sake at least of the health and safety of our utilities and waterways, and much more directly for the sake of our humanity.