Leftist magazine The Nation posted the ironically-titled Shameless in Colorado:
"That was my fetus! I had worked out a situation to take care of that fetus in a way that was appropriate for me and my family and our religious views." Roberts knew she had to respond to the indignity. But what is the appropriate reaction to such a bizarre and personal affront? "I can't imagine going to a Catholic grave and digging it up and saying I don't think this should be here, I'm going to put it in my Jewish graveyard," she says.
Earth to Ms. Roberts: If it mattered so much to you what happened to the charred ashes of your fetus, why didn't you attend to them when you had the abortion?
Yet another of Hern's patients, Povy Atchison, and her husband, Lloyd Athearn, devised their own elaborate rituals. Because of a malformation of their fetus's lungs that made it unable to live outside the womb, Atchison had an abortion about five and a half months into her pregnancy. ... when Hern offered her the ashes, she agreed to take them.
The two [sprinkled the ashes in places that were meaningful to them] "It was our desire to show what we hoped would have been our child many places that were special to us," says Atchison, who fumes when she thinks of how she would have felt had her ashes been included in the church's mass burial. "I would have felt that this baby's been taken away from me again," she says. "I would be so incredibly angry."
Why? This is bewildering.
[Another Hern patient] fell sick, spending days in bed, when she first heard that her fetus had been part of the church's ceremony. Perhaps, she offers generously, the church didn't realize the pain it would cause by conducting services for fetuses without the consent of the individual women who had carried them.
What's with this woman? Why would somebody else paying reverence to something she threw away put her in bed sick?
This whole brouhaha is just too bizarre.
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