It’s called Waste-to-Energy and sounds like a practical but innocuous program where waste products are incinerated to generate energy.

But the program has come under new scrutiny with the recent revelation that hospitals in the UK acknowledged at least 15,500 dead babies (some aborted and others from miscarriages) have been intentionally incinerated as “clinical waste.” The hospitals used the generated power from these incinerators for electricity and heat at their facilities. With gross mendacity, some hospital officials even reassured grieving parents their dead babies were to be cremated.

One writer from the UK Telegraph describes it this way:  “… institutions created to protect life are being fueled by burning the remains of the dead. [This] story, of light bulbs lit by human remains, is the purest example of the banality of evil, because it is the kind of evil that is motivated by the desire to keep things quiet and tidy.” In the same article, this writer refers to this example of “efficient recycling” as more “akin to cannibalism.”

Thankfully, UK Health Minister Dr. Dan Poulter has decreed the practice “unacceptable” and called for banning its horrific continuation.

But the West, as the Telegraph writer Dr. Tim Stanley is quick to note, is where gender-specific abortions are tolerated today as “not in the public interest.” The West, yes, the bastion of our more-civilized inclinations, a superior and exalted place from which we observe developing-world savagery and look down our collective noses at their brutality and backwardness … and deny any possibility for similar savagery being committed in our midst.

I never expected to post the poem below. It’s disturbing to read, but even more disturbing is how inured we civilized humans have become to the culture of death surrounding us. That pervasive culture of death makes certain demands on us, one of which is to accept (without thinking or asking pertinent questions) the redefinition of phraseology that might otherwise cause us discomfort. Hence, dead babies gets redefined as medical or clinical waste, incineration is benignly relabeled cremation. God forbid anyone should suffer the least pangs of conscience!

Yet I suspect someone will object to my Hitlerian-era comparison. We’re not like them, the objectors insist.

Not like them? Perhaps not. At the cremation pits of Treblinka II, large numbers of bodies were incinerated with some of the fires operating around the clock. To my knowledge, the Nazis never attempted to recapture the generated power (from those fires) in order to heat their living quarters.