Raping the Dead
It isn't often that a news story will make me cry, but this one did. The layers of wrongness here are so manifold that it's going to take me a while to sort through them. So please bear with me.
The essential story is this. Sacred Heart of Mary Catholic Church in Boulder, Colorado, has taken upon itself the task of "rescuing" fetuses from the facilities where they are sent to be cremated. The purpose? To use the remains as part of a "memorial for the unborn." That's right. It's a memorial to the fetuses that have been lost through miscarriage, abortion, and stillbirth. And, it's all been done without the permission of the women whose pregnancies ended.
I am filled with rage. Why? Let me see if I can count the ways.
First of all, the fact that the "scientist" who ran the medical waste disposal site felt compelled to contact his local Catholic church gives me the willies. Will there be a memorial to gall bladders next? Or brain tumours?
Secondly, imagine for a moment, that you're Jewish or Muslim or Hindu or, like me, an atheist. You experience a miscarriage in a hospital. Your fetus is then turned over to the Catholics to make a holy shrine to it. Don't you think you'd find it a wee bit disturbing? Feel that perhaps your own religion had been denigrated by the assumption by another religion that it had a right to your fetus?
Third. Deep breath. In 1996, I had a second-trimester spontaneous abortion. A fetus I was carrying, a little boy, a child I wanted, spontaneously aborted when I was at a conference. I was a thousand miles from home, and bleeding and in pain and alone, I delivered a fetus in the women's restroom. The experience was devastating. But the hospital staff, and the EMTs who retrieved the fetus, were unbelievably kind and gentle. I agreed to allow an autopsy to be performed because I wanted to know why my body had expelled him. The autopsy contained no answers. Afterward, the fetus was disposed of. I assume, cremated. Because, while the possiblity of that child and the love I felt for what I was carrying within me were real, when he emerged, he was not fully formed, he was incapable of life outside of my womb, and in purely scientific terms, he was the product of a spontaneous abortion.
Did I grieve him? Of course. Did it hurt me that people had no idea how to respond to my loss? Of course. Do I wish there would have been some form of ritual that could have acknowledged my loss? Yes. But, because it was my loss, I enacted my own ritual. I grieved my own way. And I said goodbye to the possibility of that child's life on my terms. Not anyone else's.
If I had found out that someone had absconded with that body, a part of me, in order to make a political point about abortion, I would have taken those people to court. I would have charged them with theft. I would have charged them with rape. You see, that fetus was part of my body. Not anyone else's.
If the people of Sacred Heart of Mary would like to build a memorial to fetuses, go for it. But they could at least have the human decency to approach women who have suffered the loss of parts of their body--and ask their permission. But you see, they won't do that. Because they do not recognize that a fetus is apart of a woman's body. They see it as a political football, and they want to call all the plays.
I think about the loss of that fetus from time to time. It's still a painful memory. But it's my memory. Not theirs. Goddamnit, not theirs.
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=2910
http://www.memorialfortheunborn.org/more_info.htm
Update: Full disclosure. I've been asked to re-post this diary at http:www.culturekitchen.com.
I don't want to violate any rules, but I did acknowledge that the post is a DailyKos diary.