Burning Fetuses For Fuel

[seemslikeadream]

Disposing of human remains and eating them are two very different things.

You still haven't answered my question.

you're not advocating for disposing of human remains ..you are advocating for the USE of human remains for fuel.......TO KEEP YOUR FUCKING LIGHTS ON


food is fuel

[DrEvil]

Actually, that would be your lights.

You still haven't answered my question.

Edit: And to point out the obvious - I'm not advocating using humans for fuel. I'm saying that I don't have a problem with human remains being incinerated in a power station when those remains would be incinerated anyway.

[seemslikeadream]

not my lights....you have no idea where I get my electrical power from

Burning foetuses to heat hospitals: a perfect metaphor for modern Britain
Melanie McDonagh 24 March 2014 18:16


By way of a metaphor for the way the NHS and, come to that, the law regards foetuses, you can’t really better the reality, viz, that foetal remains from abortions and miscarriages are being incinerated in NHS hospitals and possibly used to heat that hospital.

If a foetus lives less than 13 weeks, it could, in Addenbrooke’s Hospital, for instance, be used as fuel as part of the hospital’s waste-to-energy schemes. And 13 weeks is just over three months’ gestation – the point at which wanted foetuses register as recognisably human on the scans that prospective parents take home and show their friends. Meanwhile, the unwanted foetuses, or the ones that die early, get dumped with the used disposable gloves, in the incinerator. I don’t know why, but it’s almost worse that some of these unfortunates are burnt as part of a progressive energy-efficiency scheme; it somehow demonstrates our social priorities – with recycling way above respect for human remains.

We owe this gruesome insight to the Channel 4 Dispatches team, which, in a programme aired tonight, reveals that at least 15,500 foetal remains were incinerated by 27 NHS trusts in the last two years alone and that Addenbrooke’s incinerated 797 foetuses below 13 weeks’ gestation at their waste-to-energy plant. It’s not alone; another facility at Ipswich was given foetal remains from another hospital as part of its waste – which is used to heat the hospital.

I swear; Jonathan Swift couldn’t have made it up.

There’s now a bit of a flutter in the NHS henhouse on the back of the revelations, with the health minister, Dr Dan Poulter, calling it ‘totally unacceptable’. But that is largely due to the fact that many of the foetuses in question were in fact the product of miscarriages…they were wanted, see? Prof Sir Mike Richards, Chief Inspector of Hospitals, said, ‘I am disappointed trusts may not be informing or consulting women and their families.’ Indeed the central thrust of the programme, called ‘Exposing Hospital Heartache’, is about the treatment that people who suffer early miscarriages sometimes receive.

And I think most of us would agree that their grief at their loss should be respected, and that they should indeed be consulted about what’s done with their offspring’s remains. But that does rather leave out of account the aborted foetuses, the ones that weren’t wanted. I don’t think anyone’s suggesting their mothers should be consulted – it might be thought a bit tactless. But a foetus is a foetus; if a wanted one is entitled to be buried or cremated decently as a fellow human being, well, same goes for the aborted ones. The law entitles us to kill them – up to birth in the case of disability – but it should not preclude treating their bodies with respect, as something other than refuse. Indeed, when parents grieve over the loss of a miscarried foetus, they are saying something about the status of unborn humans. But would Dispatches have troubled to make a programme about merely aborted remains being used as hospital fuel? I wonder.

[seemslikeadream]

Actually, that would be your lights.

You still haven't answered my question.

Edit: And to point out the obvious - I'm not advocating using humans for fuel. I'm saying that I don't have a problem with human remains being incinerated in a power station when those remains would be incinerated anyway.

YES YOU ARE advocating for the use of humans for fuel

[Iamwhomiam]

slad, with all due respect, the article was written to be not only sensational but to mock the issue's popular sensationalism.

First, human bodies are 2/3 water and would be an extremely poor fuel, as it would take more energy to burn than it would produce.

So let's be clear --- it takes more power to burn human bodies and their parts than they could possibly produce by their being burned.

I would object to the incinerator's operation under any circumstances and believe all should be shuttered. They're terribly expensive to maintain and all are highly polluting and nearly 1/3 by weight of everything burned becomes a highly toxic and problematic ash that requires disposal in special "ash only" landfills.

In fact, incinerators, whether they burn garbage and commercial & residential wastes or other form of "biomass" and their newest descendants in their evolution, 'gasifiers,' are the most expensive of all technologies used to produce electricity, astonishingly, more expensive than even nuclear power plants.

Human medical wastes, and that's what aborted fetuses are, have from time immemorial been incinerated.

I've questioned my decision to be cremated after death because being one from the highest level of the food chain, my body is laden with persistent bioaccumulative toxins and mercury and lead which will be released into the air when my body's cremated, where it will do more damage to many more than it did me.

Yes, it sounds ugly and repulsive and a practice that should be halted immediately.

I feel that way about all incinerators.

edited to add third sentence, above.

edited again to tidy up typos!

[seemslikeadream]

The mothers were told the remains had been ‘cremated.’....NOT THAT THEY HAD BEEN USED FOR FUEL! just a technicality

One of the country’s leading hospitals, Addenbrooke’s in Cambridge, incinerated 797 babies below 13 weeks gestation at their own ‘waste to energy’ plant. The mothers were told the remains had been ‘cremated.’

Another ‘waste to energy’ facility at Ipswich Hospital, operated by a private contractor, incinerated 1,101 foetal remains between 2011 and 2013.

They were brought in from another hospital before being burned, generating energy for the hospital site. Ipswich Hospital itself disposes of remains by cremation.

“This practice is totally unacceptable,” said Dr Poulter.

“While the vast majority of hospitals are acting in the appropriate way, that must be the case for all hospitals and the Human Tissue Authority has now been asked to ensure that it acts on this issue without delay.”

Sir Bruce Keogh, NHS Medical Director, has written to all NHS trusts to tell them the practice must stop.

The Chief Medical Officer, Dame Sally Davies, has also written to the Human Tissue Authority to ask them make sure that guidance is clear.

And the Care Quality Commission said it would investigate the programme’s findings.

Prof Sir Mike Richards, Chief Inspector of Hospitals, said: “I am disappointed trusts may not be informing or consulting women and their families.

[seemslikeadream]

slad, with all due respect, the article was written to be not only sensational but to mock the issue's popular sensationalism.

First, human bodies are 2/3 water and would be an extremely poor fuel, as it would take more energy to burn than it would produce.
I would object to the incinerator's operation under any circumstances and believe all should be shuttered. They terribly expensive to maintain and all are highly polluting and nearly 1/3 by weight of everything burned becomes a highly toxic and problematic ash that requires disposal in special "ash only" landfills.

In fact, incinerators, whether they burn garbage and commercial & residential wastes or other form of "biomass" and their newest descendants evolution, 'gasifiers,' are the most expensive of all technologies used to produce electricity, astonishingly, more expensive than even nuclear power plants.

Human medical wastes, and that's what aborted fetuses are and have from time immemorial been incinerated.

I've questioned my decision to be cremated after death because being one from the highest level of the food chain, my body is laden with persistent bioaccumulative toxins and mercury and lead which will be released into the air when my body's cremated, where it will do more damage to many more than it did me.

Yes, it sounds ugly and repulsive and a practice that should be halted immediately.

I feel that way about all incinerators.

USING HUMAN FETUSES FOR FUEL

[DrEvil]

So to sum up - You're fine with human remains being thrown in an incinerator, as long as that incinerator doesn't do anything but incinerate stuff.

I can see you already lost your temper and started screaming at people again, so I'll bow out for now.

[seemslikeadream]

fuck you! be my guest...go burn a fetus..don't let someone else do your dirty work...don't be a coward..have the courage of your convictions and EAT IT .....after you've cooked it.....of course

[Wombaticus Rex]

fuck you!

Thank you for this clear-cut demonstration of how to get suspended for a week. See you on the 27th.

[Iamwhomiam]

Slad, did you read what I wrote?

Burning fetuses cannot generate energy!

[Searcher08]

I find the issue viscerally disturbing and tried to sense why - and realised my 'mental maps' had been including picture of borderline viable infants being burned alive. Given the often incredible slackness and callousness within the hospital settings, such occurrences are potentially more likely than might first appear. Certainly organ harvesting has happened from dead children in the UK.

I think the issue is that the owners of the body should be informed about disposal options.
I think there is a wide range of stakeholders in the situation and treating them as one homogeneous set seems crazy to me.

For parents of a late term miscarriage / near still birth, the situation is potentially very different both physical and psychologically and emotionally than a teenage girl's 8 week abortion and a solution system should accommodate them both and also issues like religion and public health.

[DrEvil]

^^This. Thanks for having a more nuanced view than either me or slad.

[blankly]

There is an issue with this. The mention of Addenbrookes put me in mind of it. The disposal of a fetus should not be casual because it allows for the concealment of criminal activity.

[operator kos]

I guess everyone has different levels of squeamishness. I don't much care what ya'll do with my meatsack after it stops working. You have my permission to eat my dead body. You have my permission to capture methane from it as it decomposes to burn for fuel. You can grind it up and feed it to fish or use it as mulch for a tree. Much more appealing than having it pumped full of toxic chemicals to be preserved in the ground where nobody's going to see it anyways. Frankly, I'm all for something useful being done with my body once I'm done using it.