The Patriot Post® · In Brief: What We Throw Away
Leftists will go to any lengths to defend abortion on demand, but where they must begin is by denying the truth of life itself. It might be denying a baby’s heartbeat, or it might be, as Alexandra DeSanctis recounts, opposing any requirements regarding even the disposal of the body.
As of 2020, it is illegal in Vermont to place food scraps in the trash can. Instead, all residents and businesses must compost all of their food waste — or else they must trek, with their scraps in tow, to one of the state’s drop-off stations for proper disposal. The compost requirement is just one element of Vermont’s universal recycling law, which forbids the disposal of recyclables, yard waste, and food in the ordinary trash.
This kind of do-gooder regulation is rampant among leftists all over the nation. Plastic bags, straws, you name it.
There are very few things that progressives are uninterested in regulating, taxing, or otherwise censuring. One major exception: the business of eliminating “unwanted” human beings prior to birth. In Vermont, home of the country’s most aggressive waste-disposal regime, a state where it is now illegal to place your food waste in the wastebin, there is no law requiring the respectful disposal of fetal remains after an abortion.
The abortion industry and its activist allies appear to find it abhorrent that unborn children might be given a proper burial or cremation after meeting their demise in abortion clinics across the country.
DeSanctis notes that an Indiana disposal law was recently struck down by a federal judge. What did the law require? That a mother be offered the choice of what to do with the remains. If she declined, the clinic or hospital must choose between burial and cremation. That’s it. Not obstruction of abortion itself, not burden on the mother. Just a choice — albeit one that highlights what she’s doing.
So, the truth is all too obvious, DeSanctis concludes:
There has never been a sound legal case against these laws. But, as with most things pertaining to abortion, the legality was never the point. Opposition to treating the dead unborn child with dignity stems not from any religious belief or legal doctrine but rather from the understanding that, if we are to accept abortion, we must maintain the fiction that the child isn’t a child at all. It would be far too gruesome to expect a woman to go through with an abortion after being asked to decide how she’d like to dispose of the tiny body of her dead child.
Maintaining the fiction of abortion as a simple matter of “the right to choose” or “women’s health care” requires choosing not to see what is before our eyes. To save the planet, we must dutifully separate our garbage in neatly demarcated receptacles. To save abortion, we must throw our children out with medical waste.