Foreign Media, Fox News Cover British Prenatal Incineration Scandal; Other Media Out to Lunch

March 26th, 2014 1:03 PM

On Monday, The UK's Daily Telegraph spotlighted the scoop of another British media outlet, Channel 4, which discovered the beyond abhorrent practice of 10 NHS hospitals incinerating over 15,000 bodies of unborn babies from miscarriages and abortions. The investigation by the Channel 4 program Dispatches found that some of the infants' remains were even used to heat the medical facilities.

This scandal, which got picked up by newspapers across much of the Anglosphere – including The Vancouver Sun and The Ottawa Citizen in Canada – has yet to receive wide coverage in the United States. So far, the only TV outlet to devote air time to the story was Monday's The Five on Fox News Channel. Host Greg Gutfeld led the segment with a warning about the repugnant nature of the subject, and likened to abuse of the bodies to a well-known sci-fi movie from the 1970s: [MP3 audio available here; video below the jump]

GREG GUTFELD: This is probably the only time I'll ever say this on TV: if you have kids, make them leave the room, and if you're cooking dinner, turn off the set for a few minutes and come back, because what I'm going to talk about is pretty gross. So, I'll keep it short, but here it goes: there's a report out of Britain claiming that 15,000 fetuses were incinerated at NHS hospitals, and used sometimes to heat the hospitals, as part of a waste-to-energy program.

I know – it's unreal. It reminds me of a movie I saw as a kid called Soylent Green. It's about an ugly future where humans survived off processed food made from people. Soylent Green was the food – it was us – a solution to mass poverty.

So, what's England's excuse? How did they get to this point? And what does this say about humanity, when flesh becomes fuel for those lucky enough to live? And what constitutes waste these days? Waste is a substance without value. If you abort a healthy child as a choice, do you forfeit the right to care about where it goes next? Once you remove moral values, sadness over its usage becomes absurd. It's like mourning the loss of a tumor. Finally, I wonder how many media types who believe in waste-to-energy think fossil fuels are evil? Out with the old, in with the new – I can see the headline: 'U.K. Discovers New Source of Green Energy to Undercut Putin.' Soylent Green is energy.

Gutfeld continued by playing a clip of a woman featured in Channel 4 investigation, who decried how she wasn't able to give a proper burial to her deceased unborn baby:

CATHRYN HURLEY, LOST BABY (from Channel 4's "Dispatches"): I asked one of the nurses, what would happen to my baby? And she just kind of said, 'Well, it will be incinerated with the rest of the day's waste.' And so, that – that was really difficult to hear, because, to me, it wasn't the day's waste. It was my baby. It would have been nice to have some kind of choice about it – to, kind of, mark that baby's life – and there was nothing within the hospital that gave us that opportunity.

All of The Five panelists, including liberal Bob Beckel, slammed the government-run British health care system for letting the inhumane practice go on for so long, and Gutfeld and co-host Dana Perino wondered if any other media outlet was going to pick up on the scandal:


GUTFELD: ...[I]t's such a horrible story, and I know that it's 5:30 in the – 5:51 in the evening, but who else is going to talk about it if we don't?

ANDREA TANTAROS: That's right. Well, whether you're pro-choice or pro-life, I think you'll agree this is a heinous story – probably the worst that we've ever done on The Five – but it's – it is worth talking about. And this is what happens, I think, when governments, like in England, take control of the health care system. They're not interested in the individual or people's feelings. They're interested in the bell curve. Everything for the greater good is put above the needs of the individual. And so, you have these stories, like this woman, saying, 'I would like a little more choice.' Isn't that interesting? She doesn't have a choice.

GUTFELD: Yeah – true-

BOB BECKEL: You know, it's interesting: I was involved in the waste energy business, actually, for a while, and the expense of burning garbage – what it's meant to burn – it's not meant to burn human flesh. And the idea that they would do this, and get away with this, for this long is, is to me actually – it's just outrageous.

ERIC BOLLING: So, very quickly, it just begs the question: all these abortion clinics, what are they doing? What are they doing? It's just a complete disregard – a blatant disregard for human life. It's disgusting – nothing short.

DANA PERINO: Am I right that – in the clip that we saw – that interview, she – she lost her baby. She didn't choose to abort the baby. So, I think that tonight, on that program, as I've read the articles about it, it actually does talk about women who made a decision – women and maybe men – that were involved in that decision to abort a baby, and where – are they rethinking that choice?

And I'm actually glad to see that Britain – having lived there – that Channel 4 is taking this on and exposing it, because again, if we don't talk about it, and we just pretend like this is too hard to talk about, then I wonder where else you're going to get it? But at least you have a free media in Britain where you can talk about it.

GUTFELD: Yeah – and officials have condemned it, but-

TANTAROS: Kind of-

GUTFELD: They should have known. They should have known. It's crazy.