The New York City Department of Health (NYC Health) is solidifying its erroneous stance that preborn babies are not human beings, as it plans to toss a requirement on how their bodies should be handled.
According to the New York Post, in a unanimous vote, NYC Health has decided to throw away the requirement that babies aborted at or after 24 weeks (that’s approximately six months of pregnancy) be treated as human beings and sent to funeral homes for a proper burial or cremation. Instead, the abortion facilities can keep the bodies on-premises to do what they please with them. There will be a public hearing on the matter on August 15. Comments must be submitted by August 1.
“The Department is proposing to amend the Health Code Articles 203 and 205 to eliminate the requirement that any conceptus that has completed 24 or more weeks of gestation be disposed of as human remains,” the proposal reads. “Disposition as human remains would remain available upon request by those who desire burial or cremation.”
“Conceptus” appears to be the NYC Health euphemism for preborn babies, but that term is technically defined as “the embryo in the uterus, especially during the early stages of pregnancy.” This is not a fitting definition for a preborn baby at 24 weeks or beyond, yet this is term NYC Health has chosen to use for these children aborted in the second and third trimesters.
Premature children born as young as 21 weeks have survived, which means there’s no possible way for a person or a health department to logically and successfully argue that these babies aren’t alive before an abortion and aren’t human — at least not without exposing their pro-abortion, pro-population control, pro-eugenic beliefs and biases, along with their apparent desire to keep women in the dark about what abortion truly is and what it does to human beings in the womb.
“This is horrible. They’re treating human beings like trash,” said Jeaane Head, a retired registered nurse who has served as the National Right to Life Committee’s representative to the United Nations. “It’s infanticide. They don’t want mothers to know they killed their baby.”
Disposing of the evidence
The department’s chief epidemiologist, Gretchen Van Wye, argued that “It’s very traumatic to people” to have to call a funeral home. She continued, “This is a matter we don’t think the government needs to be involved in. This is something for the patient and provider to talk about.”
However, every state has statutes about the proper disposal of human remains, and in New York, “specific regulations govern” the process of the handling, burial, and cremation of deceased individuals “to ensure the respectful treatment of the deceased and compliance with public health and safety standards.” But NYC Health only wants this “respectful treatment” to apply to those who were not denied their right to life before they were born.
After all, if people were to see the bodies of aborted babies and realize how horrifically these babies are treated, it could create problems for the pro-abortion NYC government. And it will expose two truths: 1) human fetuses are human beings and 2) abortion violently kills them. The bodies of five babies aborted late in pregnancy and discovered in a medical waste bin outside of a no-rules abortion facility in Washington, D.C., exposed these truths.
Experts have stated that the aborted babies from D.C. were likely old enough to have survived outside the womb — just like the babies NYC Health is discussing. One of the babies, whom activists named “Harriet,” had an incision on the back of her neck that could indicate the use of the federally banned D&X abortion procedure (more commonly known as partial-birth abortion). Other intact babies found in the bin could have been killed by infanticide after surviving the abortion procedure (but we may never know, because authorities refuse to examine their remains). Two of the babies appeared to have been killed by D&E dismemberment abortion.
Warning: These images are graphic and disturbing.
Baby Angel was found in a medical waste bin. Experts believe he was possibly exsanguinated and dismembered alive.
Baby Harriet side profile – Photo courtesy of Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising.
Baby Phoenix was found still in the amniotic sac in a medical waste bin outside a DC abortion business. Photo courtesy of Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising.
Seeing the baby is “very traumatic”
Van Wye said that women would find arranging cremation or a burial for an aborted baby’s body “very traumatic.” But if the aborted child is merely a product of conception, pregnancy tissue, and not even a human, why should it be traumatic? This comment reveals the truth. Abortion is traumatic because it destroys a human being.
Women who have seen their aborted babies have discussed how traumatic it was for them — even during early pregnancy.
What Van Wye and other abortion advocates at NYC Health are arguing is that women should be trusted to make the decision of when and how to kill their preborn babies while also claiming it’s too traumatizing for these same women to agree to either cremation or burial for those babies. Can women handle abortion or can’t they, NYC Health?
Even pro-abortion research reveals that most abortions done late in pregnancy are not done for maternal or fetal health reasons, despite the pro-abortion media’s incessant claims to the contrary. The media either isn’t paying attention to the research of its abortion industry allies, or it is aware and instead prefers to spread the false narrative that late abortions were all “wanted” babies and are only done for the most tragic of circumstances. There’s no other way to say it: the media and other abortion industry allies are lying about these late abortions.
If seeing an aborted child’s body is traumatic (or if merely deciding on whether to cremate or bury the body of the child you just aborted is traumatic), it’s likely because women will be facing the true impact of their “choice” to seek euphemistic “reproductive health care.”
Abortion advocates have long thrived on the ignorance of the public when it comes to what abortion actually is and what it does. They have, for decades, dehumanized preborn children and propped abortion up as a legitimate “health care” procedure. They have claimed photos of aborted children are “fake” and have pretended that preborn human beings are nothing more than tiny white balls of fluff. But they’re not. They are clearly humans, and abortion is killing — not legitimate health care.
Baby Holly was dismembered by D&E abortion at a Washington D.C. abortion business. Photo courtesy of Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising.
Christopher was found in a medical waste box outside a DC abortion facility.
Respecting babies is “too costly”
Along with the claim that NYC Health wants to help women avoid trauma by not letting them see or even decide the proper treatment of their children’s remains, the health department claims that treating the remains of human babies with respect and dignity is too “costly,” and therefore, unfair to women. This makes it obvious that they are speaking of women of a certain income and that they don’t care about them or their babies.
This begs the question: if late abortions after 21 weeks are really so “rare,” as we’re constantly told — 1-1.3% of all abortions (which equates to a not-so-small total of around 11,000 every single year) — why can’t NYC Health divert a small amount of their abortion-friendly budget to help women pay for proper disposal of their babies’ remains? After all, in 2023, New York Abortion Access Fund’s Community pledged 1.8 million dollars to directly fund abortion for 1,800 women, and in 2022, NYC Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and the Council’s Women’s Caucus announced that the New York City Council would give $1 million towards expanding access to abortion care in New York City.
But there’s unsurprisingly no money offered to help low-income women bury their aborted babies because that would acknowledge that these are, in fact, human beings.
“This is about an individual’s medical decision and removing a burdensome and costly requirement from the health code. How someone decides to proceed after making such a personal medical decision should not be dictated by the government,” said the department’s spokesperson Patrick Gallahue. (emphasis added)
Likewise, Dr. Erinma Ukoha, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in New York who should know better — except she’s also a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health, echoed Gallahue’s comments. “The NYC Board of Health’s decision to remove the burdensome, inequitable disposition requirement for people accessing later abortion care is an important step in the right direction,” she said. (emphasis added)
And Wye said, “[Funerals are] inequitable. It’s costly.” She added, “People need to call a funeral director … and pay for a burial or cremation.” (emphasis added)
So it appears that abortions can be funded for low-income women in the name of “equity” — but not the proper treatment of their children’s remains.
Imagine making such comments about the body of a born child — that because the mother can’t afford a proper funeral, her child doesn’t deserve a proper funeral? Imagine telling her that to give her child a funeral would be too “burdensome” and therefore her baby should be thrown away or sold for parts.
Of course, that’s the ruse of abortion: it convinces people that what they’re destroying isn’t really a human; it’s ‘just a fetus.’ So, why should an almost fully developed child in the second or third trimester be treated like a human?
This isn’t just “tissue.” It’s a child at 24 weeks gestation:
Preborn child 24 weeks gestation
And this was what baby Toby looked like as a preemie born at 24 weeks gestation:
Baby Toby, born at 24 weeks
And this isn’t just “tissue.”
These two preborn children died at 21 weeks (right) and 24 weeks (left) gestation due to prostaglandin abortions. (Images courtesy of ProLifeSociety.com and ImagesOfAbortion.com)
What will happen to the bodies?
A big issue in the abortion industry is where to dispose of the bodies. Jonathon Van Maren, a writer, public speaker, and pro-life activist, raised this question in an op-ed for The Stream. He wrote:
During a panel on abortion victim photography, someone asked us for a question we could ask that would highlight the magnitude of what abortion has cost us. Monica [Miller] paused for a moment. Then she responded. “Where do you put sixty-five million bodies?”
That question crystallizes everything. Abortion isn’t about reproductive rights. It isn’t about healthcare. It is about people. Those people have bodies. And those bodies go somewhere after they have been poisoned, dismembered and suctioned into bloody slurry. Where do they go?
The truth is that aborted babies in the U.S. have been thrown in dumpsters, dumped in landfills, flushed into sewers, kept in freezers, burned to create electricity, burned in fields, and stored in cars, homes, and janitor’s closets. Other aborted children have been sold piece by piece for their body parts. These are not exaggerations.
Renee Chelian of Northland Family Planning in Michigan once said she was consumed with the fear that she could not dispose of the remains of abortion victims. She said she was “ready to drive to upper Michigan and have a bonfire,” or determine how “far in the woods would I have to go to have this fire, that nobody was going to see me.”
The bodies of the babies found in D.C. were allegedly set to be burned for energy in Baltimore before they were rescued from that fate.
Once the rule officially changes, viable babies aborted late in pregnancy in NYC could be sent to rot in the city’s landfills, sewers, dumpsters, and medical waste facilities, where they will be denied the respect owed to them. And their bodies — the evidence that they were human and violently killed — could disappear forever.
