Aborted babies heating British Hospitals?

Cora Sherlock

Cora Sherlock is an Irish pro-life campaigner, lawyer and blogger. She describes herself on her blog as the “Deputy Chairperson of the Pro Life Campaign, a single-issue, non-denominational organisation that campaigns against abortion, embryonic stem cell research, euthanasia, and other issues surrounding the right to life and dignity of human beings.”

After reading about it in the right wing Daily Telegraph, Sherlock sent out the following Tweet: “How come #IrelandsGuiltySecret didn't address fact that incinerated remains of 15,000 aborted babies were used to heat hospitals in UK?”

Kevin Higgins the Irish poet whose poem on the British Minister For Work and Pensions, Ian Duncan Smith we published earlier, was so impressed on reading Ms. Sherlock’s Tweet it inspired him to poetically suggest what might be done now society has in its possession such inspirational and powerful knowledge.  FFWP is not a poetry blog but it is a political one and art, poetry and politics are intertwined.  Higgin’s satirical political wit jumps out at the reader in this one.

Renewable Energy: Cora Sherlock’s Excellent Suggestion

   
We must stop giving it away for nothing
–our greatest natural resource –
the Department of Finance estimates
Tallaght Hospital could heat itself
entirely on foetuses properly burnt
in one of those state of the art
energy efficient furnaces that are
all the rage in Sweden.

Within the lifetime of this government
every hospital in the country could be fuelled
by the unwanted contents of visiting wombs.
The minority of cranks aside,
the average foetus would be delighted
to make this small contribution towards
society’s continued warmth.

And when the ban on contraceptive devices
is re-introduced; every last diaphragm,
IUD, cock-ring, and bit of rubber
ribbed for your pleasure incinerated
in a field outside Ballinspittle,
after a blessing by Mother Teresa,
(specially flown in from
the black beyond)
and the conception rate soars
back towards
the traditional twelve
pregnancies per lifetime, two thirds,
we estimate, resulting in terminations,
we can start talking
about the export market.

Economists say the uteruses
of the greater Dublin area alone
could light the living rooms
of a medium sized British city,
such as Bradford.

Education is key.
To get the lady parts of the country
conceiving as they’ll have to,
every pubescent girl,
on her fifteenth birthday,
will be shown her way around
the first twenty pages of the Kama Sutra
by a fully qualified curate
under the age of seventy.

This policy’s success
will abolish talk of deficits
and oil prices. Instead,
we’ll debate furiously
whether to blow our vast surplus
on a few thousand more
unemployed tin whistle players
with the hint of an English accent,
or free nose jobs and tummy tucks
for the wives of the wealthy—the biggest
plastic surgery project in world history
since NASA’s unsuccessful attempt
to build another Joan Rivers.
  
 © KEVIN HIGGINS, 2014
More poetry and information about Kevin Higgins can be found at Salmon Poetry  

To fully appreciate Kevin’s satirical poem the reader should also take the time to read Jonathon Swifts brilliant satirical pamphlet, A Modest Proposal.  Swift published it anonymously in 1729 when free speech was a little freer due in part to the English Revolution and popular access to the moveable printing press first developed in Germany. Every social campaigner and liberally minded type with money and access to the printing press was expressing their views much as we do on social media like Facebook and Twitter today. A major issue was the terrible poverty of the lower classes particularly the starvation in Ireland under English rule and the policies of the landlords and how these terrible conditions might be improved.  Swift’s pamphlet was a direct attack on these social commentators and the landlords suggesting mockingly that the Irish might eat their babies.

Swift writes: "I grant this food may be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for Landlords, who as they have already devoured most of the Parents, seem to have the best Title to the Children."

And further, "For this kind of commodity will not bear exportation, and flesh being of too tender a consistence, to admit a long continuance in salt, although perhaps I could name a country, which would be glad to eat up our whole nation without it."

A Modest Proposal by Jonathon Swift