Tomb of the Unborn Child at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio. (image from Twitter)
Abortion advocates have recently released a flood of outlandish and deceptive claims intended to defeat and discredit efforts to ensure that deceased infants receive dignified and respectful treatment. Many in the media have joined the abortion industry’s hysterical crusade, castigating these infant dignity laws as clandestine abortion regulations designed to shutter clinics and deny women choices. Even in death, unborn infants receive no respect from an abortion industry anxious to portray such human beings as trash.
States began considering “infant dignity” laws in response to diverse and tragic occurrences—some of which followed abortions, and many that did not. Hospitals refused to release miscarried infants’ remains to their mothers for burial, families were unable to obtain certificates of stillbirth because their infants were miscarried too early, and, not surprisingly, deceased infants’ body parts were discovered in dumpsters behind abortion clinics.
Americans United for Life’s Unborn Infants Dignity Act, which state legislators frequently consult, addresses these tragedies by regulating the actions of health-care “institutions,” not patients. The model law requires abortion clinics, hospitals, and other medical facilities to offer women the opportunity to bury or cremate their deceased unborn children when the children have reached a stage of development where they have recognizable body parts. If a woman does not choose to make these arrangements, the institution must simply obtain her consent before disposing of her infant’s remains.
The institution is then required to ensure that an infant’s remains are cremated or buried—not incinerated, tossed in dumpsters, or flushed through a sewer system with medical waste. A mother who suffers miscarriage or stillbirth has the additional option of donating her infant’s remains in compliance with her state’s Anatomical Gifts Act.
Women are not required to collect tissue in their homes following early miscarriages or chemical abortions. Families need not plan funeral services against their wishes—a simple signature agreeing to the final disposition of their infant’s remains is all that is required.
Abortion advocates falsely claim that crematoriums are unable to accommodate the tiny bodies of deceased unborn infants. Such an assertion is ludicrous, given that crematoriums already cremate the bodies of infants who die prematurely and miscarried or stillborn infants at certain gestations. Infant dignity laws ensure that families of unborn infants who die at younger gestations are able to cremate or bury their children.
Infant dignity laws do not regulate abortion, but the abortion industry’s vehement opposition to their enactment is telling. Abortion providers have spent decades striving to convince women—and themselves—that an abortion removes nothing but a “product of conception.” But you do not bury or cremate a placenta or umbilical cord.
From http://cal-catholic.com/
