The pain of having a miscarriage and bearing a stillborn child may already be unbearable for some women but the agony is compounded knowing that the body of their dead child is not treated with respect and afforded human dignity.
Such was the experience of 35-year old Cathryn Hurley. Hurley was on the 13th week of her first pregnancy when she was told that her baby has died. She was hysterical and crying but her grief worsened when she asked one of the hospital's medical staff what would happen to her baby. A nurse told her that the body of her dead child will be incinerated along with the rest of the hospital's waste.
"That was difficult to hear. To me, it wasn't the day's waste, it was my baby," Hurley said.
Hurley's experience is unfortunately not a remote case. It turns out that a number of hospitals in the U.K. incinerate aborted and miscarried babies as clinical waste. Some hospitals even use the fetal remains to produce energy for heating. Ten National Health Service (NHS) trusts have already admitted guilty of disposing fetal remains along with other hospital wastes while 17 more are believed to have also engaged in the practice.
In the last two years alone, 15,500 fetal remains were burned by 27 NHS trusts, an investigation by the Channel 4 Dispatches program found. It also discovered that some parents were not even consulted about what they wanted to happen to their child's remains. Some were not even aware of what the hospital decided to do with the body.
Samantha Allington related that she was not even consulted with what the hospital decided to do with her child's remains when it came out of her.
"I had to do urine sample and the baby passed when I went to the toilet. A nurse came and grabbed the pot and ran off with it," Allington recalled. "I was then told it had been incinerated. I felt like my baby had been stolen from me, I had no rights over what happened."
The Department of Health has already called for an immediate ban on the practice.
