Bury stillborn in backyard, couple told
This story from The Australian newspaper leaves me gasping with horror. In it, a couple is told by the doctors at a hospital in the Northern Territory that their baby, stillborn at 17 weeks, can be taken home and buried in the backyard. They are then handed the stilborn child in a kidney dish and left to their own devices.
What a humiliating and traumatizing way to treat the death of a child! But the legislation in the Northern Territory doesn't even allow the issuing of a birth certificate or a death certificate since, at this stage of gestation, the baby is viewed in law as nothing more than a bunch of cells that the mother's body rejected. Not only do the parents experience the sorrow of death, but the refusal by those who ought to care for both parents and child to acknowledge that anything serious has even happened.
God will certainly judge us for the way we treat his little ones.