thank you for your sacrifice

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Dec 06, 2005

Those unfailingly altruistic folks over at Abortion Clinic Days set the rest of us straight on their respect for, ah, medical waste.

There are very strict guidelines about how all human tissue is handled, and medical waste is a very well regulated business, the Sopranos not withstanding. It is ultimately buried or burned. But of course, the real reason for the rant is that the anti's want to be able to harass the medical waste people, the operators of the incinerators, which are often hospitals, and of course US! And this moral outrage comes from the people who have literally stolen fetuses from pathology labs, clinics, etc. and paraded them around in shoe boxes, pawed through them on video, and generally exploited -- not respected -- fetuses.

In my clinic, we wash off the tissue and examine it. It is treated respectfully and put with the woman's first name into a container. We show it to patients if they ask to see it, and make sure they understand which part is the sac (later the placenta), which part the pregnancy if visible (after 9 weeks), and which part the lining of the uterus. People have been known to pray over it, write notes for inclusion, "baptize" it, etc etc. Some clinic staff have also been known to say a little prayer over it -- thanking it for its sacrifice so that the woman could continue on the path she was on.

And, after all, isn't that what the caring professions are all about?