Bury stillborn in backyard

This story from The Australian newspaper leaves me gasping with horror.

In it, a couple is told by the doctors at the hospital in the Northern Territory that their baby, stillborn at seventeen weeks, can be taken home and buried in the backyard. Then they are 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 issue 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 is there the sorrow of death, but there is 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.