The Telegraph reports:

The bodies of thousands of aborted and miscarried babies were incinerated as clinical waste, with some even used to heat hospitals, an investigation has found. 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.

Tim Stanley is outraged:

That’s right – institutions created to protect life are being fuelled by burning the remains of the dead. Some bureaucrat somewhere obviously regarded this as “efficient recycling”. It’s more akin to cannibalism.

We pride ourselves in the West on being more civilized that the rest. We have a free press, jury trials, human rights and relative peace. And our TV screens are filled with images of brutality in the developing world that reinforce our sense of superiority. I’ve just finish reading Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, Jason Stearn’s account of the Congo wars that depicts savagery committed wantonly and in the open. Its crimes are visceral – “something foreigners do”, not us.

But what we actually do in Europe and America is to tuck our social evils away into spaces that we can’t see.

Tom Wilson comments:

This in a sense brings us back to the question about how any of this could have happened in the first place. According to a Gallup poll 71 percent of British people say that religion does not occupy an important place in their life. If one were to discount ethnic minorities and immigrant groups then that figure would doubtlessly be considerably higher.

For all the high-minded notions about human rights that are prevalent in British society, it would appear that this has been no substitute for religion when it comes to protecting human dignity. The reality is that much of British society inhabits a paradigm in which, fundamentally, nothing is true and everything is permitted.

Culture of death, straight up.

UPDATE: Noah172 says in the comments thread:

If, say, 15,500 non-white Muslim immigrants had been complaining about pork being served in their children’s school lunches, something would have been done, careers would have ended, and profuse apologies issued.