Label this BG, for Beyond Ghastly. The Telegraph (UK) reports that the remains of more than 15,000 aborted and miscarried babies were incinerated as “clinical waste” by hospitals in Britain, with some used in “waste-to-energy” plants to heat the facilities.

Ten NHS trusts have admitted burning foetal remains alongside other rubbish while two others used the bodies in ‘waste-to-energy’ plants which generate power for heat. [Emphasis added] Last night the Department of Health issued an instant ban on the practice which health minister Dr Dan Poulter branded ‘totally unacceptable.’ At least 15,500 foetal remains were incinerated by 27 NHS trusts over the last two years alone, Channel 4’s Dispatches discovered.

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The article goes on the note that parents who lose children in early pregnancy were often treated without compassion and not consulted about the fate of the miscarried remains. At one of the country’s leading hospitals, Addenbrooke’s in Cambridge, consigned 797 babies to the flames and then told the mothers the remains had been “cremated.”

Minister Poulter said that “the vast majority of hospitals are acting in the appropriate way,” adding that a group with the Orwellian-sounding name Human Tissue Authority has been asked to ensure that the all hospitals treat aborted and miscarried babies humanely.

Britain’s National Health System, much admired by former Obama CMS chief Donald Berwick, has made headlines before for the chilly calculus it uses in assigning a value to a human life. Last summer, a controversial end-of-life care program for elderly and terminally ill patients known as the Liverpool Care Pathway was phased out after it was revealed that hospitals hastening the death of patients by denying them food and water. Mike McNally, who reported this atrocity at PJ Media, wrote:

This is arguably the greatest scandal: patients were starved and neglected not because of staff shortages or bad management, but as a result of deliberate policies aimed at freeing up hospital beds and saving money. Staff even received financial incentives for placing patients on the program.

Another NHS investigation last year found that 25% of new mothers were abandoned by their midwives during labor and that some were left to give birth on the floor or in corridors.

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