Fraters Libertas

Paging Joseph Heller...

This story must be giving the pro-abortion crowd fits in Colorado:

Despite objections from abortion advocates, a local Catholic Church went forward with a Sunday burial service for hundreds of unborn children whose ashes were given to it by a mortuary that services a late-term abortion facility.
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The church had expected to bury more than a thousand unborn children, but Warren Hearn's (sic) abortion business blocked their efforts and asked the church to return the babies' remains to the mortuary.
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The development has Hearn (sic) vividly upset and he says Crist Mortuary was not supposed to dispose of the ashes of the babies in a religious ceremony unless receiving his permission.

"My patients are calling, and they're furious and horrified because they have worked through this," Hern claimed in an interview with the Denver Post newspaper. "They're furious at Crist Mortuary and the Catholic Church for making a public spectacle in this macabre death ritual."

Making a living by tearing babies out of their mothers' wombs is acceptable to Mr. Hern but giving their remains a proper burial is a "macabre death ritual"? Or is Mr. Hern more upset by the fact that this has become a "public spectacle"? Yes, it's best that we don't notice the 1.3 million human lives that are lost to abortion every year in the United States alone (that's about 40,000,000 lives lost since 1973 if you're keeping track).

The New York Times comes through with the clincher:

Was the material that the parishioners interred on Sunday in blue cloth bags mere medical waste? Or human remains? Colorado law has very different things to say about burial depending upon the answer, said State Representative Debbie Stafford, who has been involved in writing funeral law legislation and who went to the ceremony to support the church. A party seeking to bury cremated unclaimed human remains, for example, is bound by numerous legal requirements, including a year's waiting period after death, Ms. Stafford said. She said she believes the church members violated no laws if all they did was bury human medical waste, which is subject to different rules.
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"The church was told it was receiving human medical waste," said Ms. Stafford, who identified herself as an abortion opponent. "The collision course issue here is the definition of human."

If abortion advocates want to say we're dealing with "human medical waste" here, then what's the problem? If, on the other hand, they want to apply the legal requirements of cremated human remains, then when does Mr. Hern's murder trial begin?