Oregon Med Waste Shutdown

[3DOP]

http://news.yahoo.com/company-stopped-accepting-abortion-waste-181231787.html;_ylt=AngSdg5CC4sPznccVhmCwCHQtDMD;_ylu=X3oDMTBsanZicWdrBGNvbG8DZ3ExBHBvcwMxBHNlYwNzcg--

 

This is all over the local news here. I am very familiar with this situation, having actually loaded the conveyors at Brooks, OR, with medical waste designated for incineration. When I began working for a new company in 1997, I talked to my priest about whether my work for the medical waste service provider was a form of cooperation with abortion that could be a reason to seek other employment. As recently as this summer, when a parishioner presented an article on a parish e-mail list, highlighting my company's involvement with the abortion industry, I spoke to our priest again about my own relationship with the company. Obviously, my priests, who were both vehemently anti-abortion, assured me that any cooperation was so remote as to clear the company and me of any wrong doing. 

 

I am also on record here as being against every human abortion including those conceived during rapes or whatever they call that when family members copulate. Sorry, the word escapes me. So anyway, I appreciate abortion protesting and welcome ways to make the holocaust stop. My wife pickets an abortion clinic for a certain number of days every year. But I don't understand what medical waste specialists are supposed to do when their customers give them aborted babies. What should happen to aborted babies? The parents had it killed. They aren't going to pay for a funeral. So why are abortion protest groups demonizing an industry that has very little control over how we are regulated and allowed to operate?

 

There are articles that make it sound like aborted babies are fueling the economy and the sole purpose of medical waste companies. I don't mean to minimize the horror of abortion, but it seems like the abortion protest community is magnifying the "value" that companies like the one I work for get from handling aborted babies. It causes many more problems than any "value" associated with it. We recently had to change the company from whom we lease our trucks because they were sensitive to the fact that we have to service abortion clinics. But the aborted fetuses can only be a tiny percentage of what we pick up, even at a clinic. It would take literally years to fill a trailer from the medical waste that we get from most abortion clinics. I haven't been in one for many years now, but I can remember pulling several hundred pounds of waste a week out of one large clinic back in the day. It wasn't filled with tiny corpses. Abortion clinics are doing medical procedures, they are giving IV's, taking blood, using syringes, and producing the same kinds of medical waste as any other kind of surgical procedure. Some of them also deliver live babies on purpose. I am pretty sure most placentas would weigh a lot more than the corpse of most aborted children. This is why we have to service them even if they did something else with the children they murder. There is no way that I was picking up hundreds of pounds of dead babies a week in this one location.

 

So the dead child is a very small percentage of the waste stream from an abortion clinic. And an abortion clinic is a tiny percentage of all of the medical waste. My company currently runs six trailers a week rated at over a 100,000 lbs to a facility in the Gorge where it is dumped after autoclave sterilization. That's over one million lbs of waste every two weeks. There should be no tissue in any of that waste at all. Incineration is ordinarily reserved for chemotherapy waste and biological tissue. It seems to be about every two weeks that we take a short trailer, of no more than 20,000 lbs, to the incineration facility at Brooks. There can't be anywhere near enough murdered children to a fill a trailer every two weeks. Sadly, they are most often killed when they weigh very much less than a baby does when it is born. I would suggest that dead babies are less than 1% of 1% of the medical waste stream.  

 

What should the medical waste service community do? Every customer signs a manifest affirming that what we have picked up is compliant with all national and international regulations. I assume it is illegal to flush the corpse down the toilet. It is probably illegal to put the corpse in the regular waste stream. Those options would be far far less expensive. So why do abortion clinics give the corpses to us? It isn't to save money or generate electricity. We are expensive and no one uses us unless they are forced to do so. It is to be compliant with state and federal regulatory agencies. I have to ask those who might be prone to be outraged that dead babies are present in waste that when burned, becomes electricity, what kind of procedure should take place instead?

 

I am against abortion, every abortion. As I tried to make plain, I think it is a euphemism to refer to a dead and murdered child as a "fetus". They are babies. But seeing that these tiny, innocent, dead, murdered children are a reality, people on my side need to come up with an alternative for the proper disposal of the corpses, if we are going to protest what is currently happening. Will we pay for the funeral? It's an idea? Burying the dead is a corporal work of mercy in the Catholic faith. I would welcome, and I suspect my company executives would probably welcome, any solution that removed medical waste services from the abortion picture entirely.

 

Thank you for your consideration of this question.

 

Rory 

[Calm]

A very troubling article...

I can see how it got traction in the emotional appeal. They could drive abortion clinics out of business by requiring extra measures taken adding to expenses. I don't see your company profiting from it anymore than a company that employs someone who got an abortion so she could keep working without interruption without telling her employer. A very minor byproduct of someone else's choice.

The safety aspect alone should make this a nonstory, IMO.

[strappinglad]

I see the dilemma .It could be considered unseemly to dispose of aborted babies in a landfill . What is done at hospitals with stillborns or the remains of the medical procedure known as a D&C ? It might be necessary to collect and store all such remains and have them cremated periodically and then buried in a gravesite at a cemetery. Seems like a lot of work but maybe it is the least society could do. one gravesite could easily handle 100,000 cremated remains.

As for your company, Rory, it provides a necessary service and should not be tainted by the abortion activists.

[Kenngo1969]

Anyone who, on the basis of this set of facts, would allege that you are "supporting" abortion, could also make an argument that honest, decent, fair-minded people who oppose other things on the basis of conscience are actually "supporting" those things, as well.  Such an argument would be a sort of "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" sort of thing, and would look something like this (I'll use myself as an example):

 

Ken supports A, who supports B, who supports C, who supports D, who supports E, who supported Hitler.  Ergo, Ken would have supported Hitler.  It ignores the fact that, notwithstanding my support for A, the relationship between A and Hitler is too attenuated to say that I would have supported Hitler.  The same principle applies here: I think the "relationship" between abortion and the company in question is too attenuated to say that the latter supports the former.  I think you are in the clear.    If I were you, I wouldn't lose any sleep at night: of course, if I were as good a man as you, I wouldn't have to worry about losing sleep at night!  I wish you well.

 

I hope this makes sense.  I'm basically sleep-posting.  It's been a long day!  (I'll visit the Board tomorrow morning and say, "I posted that?  That doesn't even make sense!")
 

 

Best to all.

[3DOP]

Anyone who, on the basis of this set of facts, would allege that you are "supporting" abortion, could also make an argument that honest, decent, fair-minded people who oppose other things on the basis of conscience are actually "supporting" those things, as well.  Such an argument would be a sort of "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" sort of thing, and would look something like this (I'll use myself as an example):

 

Ken supports A, who supports B, who supports C, who supports D, who supports E, who supported Hitler.  Ergo, Ken would have supported Hitler.  It ignores the fact that, notwithstanding my support for A, the relationship between A and Hitler is too attenuated to say that I would have supported Hitler.  The same principle applies here: I think the "relationship" between abortion and the company in question is too attenuated to say that the latter supports the former.  I think you are in the clear.    If I were you, I wouldn't lose any sleep at night: of course, if I were as good a man as you, I wouldn't have to worry about losing sleep at night!  I wish you well.

 

I hope this makes sense.  I'm basically sleep-posting.  It's been a long day!  (I'll visit the Board tomorrow morning and say, "I posted that?  That doesn't even make sense!")

 

 

Best to all.

Thanks kenngo. I value your good opinion. I'll visit the board next morning and say, "I posted that?" Heh. I wake up in the morning once in a while and say, "I hope I didn't post what I think I posted."

 

It probably came across as little defensive on my part. I am not feeling guilty. I am just frustrated a little with "my crowd". What do they want to be done with the murder victims? They have complained in the past because it is supposed to be very valuable as medicines. This thing about electricity seems like an opportunistic way of making it seem outrageous to people who don't usually give a flip about abortion. It isn't credible. Human tissue is not the fuel that makes those fires hot and the turbines turn. They use something else and any value in moisture laden biological tissue seems to me to have to be very minimal at best. But they have probably been presenting it to the gullible public like their garbage is making local energy cheaper. Now it bites them in the rear. But my questions remain for my anti-abortion crowd...What do we want to make the abortionists do, if not to force them to give it to specialized and very expensive medical waste haulers?

 

We are upset because Canadians have to hire tractor-trailer drivers and their equipment to drag their victims, along with the garbage, across international boundaries and two state lines to dispose of children so small that they could usually go down the sewer? Additionally, those conveyors are extremely steep. Sometimes the containers start tumbling. You have to have somebody at the top and at the bottom because at the top the boxes tend to get stuck and if they don't get unstuck they pile up and you have a mess. In addition to the driver, we now hire a local "lumper" who doesn't get paid much I am sure. But this all adds up in a hurry. My first boss told about his experience down there when things got stuck and tumbling and they ended up with a bunch of dead dogs all over the pIace to clean up. I can't think of anything much less feasible, and thus expensive. It seems impossible to me that this is a big money making venture.

[Storm Rider]

Zealotry always leads to taking progressively more unrealistic positions. I strongly agree with the advice of your priests; you are not in any way supporting abortions.  This is a needed and valuable service that protects all of society. 

[BookofMormonLuvr]

I think you are missing the point of the outrage... that we live in such a morally bankrupt society that we toss, what were otherwise viable human beings, into trash bags and burn them as fuel. Kind of gives a picture of where we are really at.

[seed]

The current process sounds very logical.   I don’t believe that (based on just the tiny bit I see from this topic) that your company is in any way doing something bad.

 

You’re picking up a container that is marked as waste. 

 

Not so sure about the people putting the items into the container and the choices that lead them to do so.  But that seems like a different topic. Perhaps this is all about trying to get to them while your ppl are being used as a tool to do so.

 

At my home I have recycle and regular trash.  It’s up to me what I put into them; the carrier takes them based on the markings of the container.  I am happy they do it; else I would have to figure out what to do with a big pile of stuff I DO NOT WANT.

 

As for you, I completely agree with your priest on this point.  I also think it’s normal that it would bother you some.  Being concerned about these types of things seems like reasonable feelings.

[The Nehor]

If I can be converted into electricity when I die I am all for it.

[Kenngo1969]

I think you are missing the point of the outrage... that we live in such a morally bankrupt society that we toss, what were otherwise viable human beings, into trash bags and burn them as fuel. Kind of gives a picture of where we are really at.

I understand what you are saying, and I certainly understand the outrage engendered by the idea of "toss[ing] . . . viable human beings" into the trash.  However, as much as I understand that outrage, interfering with the disposal of medical waste isn't going to do anything to reduce the number of abortions performed.

[thesometimesaint]

Whether someone agrees with abortion or not medical waste is a serious health concern.

[Bill “Papa” Lee]

Whether someone agrees with abortion or not medical waste is a serious health concern.

Sad the gov't does not work well, nor can see the problems it creates. To quote the scriptures; "To be learned is not to be wise".

[thesometimesaint]

Sad the gov't does not work well, nor can see the problems it creates. To quote the scriptures; "To be learned is not to be wise".

 

?

[3DOP]

An update:

 

My immediate supervisor contacted me on Friday, as I believe he did all the drivers, for the purpose of instructing us not to speak if approached by anyone, especially news people, and customers, about the latest news reports. The idea of my being muzzled didn't sell so well, but the main point of interest that came up is that according to him, every one of our customers signs a standard contract which affirms that among other agreements, there will be included no human embryonic tissue above a certain weight in the medical waste containers. I probably should have questioned him about what the weight amount was. I knew that when I worked for the company in the Southeast in 1997-98, that there was a clause in the manifest the customer signed at each pick-up against if memory serves, "human fetal tissue".

 

But the problem is that we have no way of knowing if a customer is in compliance. It isn't much different as far as crud factor, than ordinary garbage. If anything, protocols are in place that make handling of medical waste probably less sensibly icky than ordinary garbage. Still, nobody goes pawing through that stuff. When I came back to the Northwest at the end of 1998, one of the drivers here became suspicious that the abortionists were mixing fetal tissue into the waste. At that time, our supervisor was a pretty strong pro-life guy himself and he called all of the clinics in our region to make sure they were aware of the policy. Still, how would we know?. As time went on, and the company grew to about five times the size it had been, we had management that was pretty obviously unconcerned about this moral question, and I just assumed that the company had decided to discontinue efforts to discourage the abortion providers, seeing that we couldn't know whether they did or didn't comply with what I thought had been company policy (no fetal tissue).

 

This was why I was surprised to hear my boss say now, that it is against the law to put it in our waste stream in addition to his assertion that there is still a clause in the original contract affirming compliance with the old policy against fetal tissue. I guess one of the reasons the language changed from fetal tissue to human embryos, is that everyone wants us to get rid of placentas and there seemed to be some question about whether a placenta might qualify as "fetal tissue". For the last eight or ten years at least, I had assumed that the company had accepted a fait accompli, and had given up on trying to exclude the little dead babies. 

 

So while I am encouraged that the company seems to have been taking a slightly higher road than I had thought it was, the question still remains. In a society that has determined that it is all right to kill "fetal tissue" without assigning it a soul, personhood, or any other attribute that would give it rights under the law, what should be done with the remains? It seems to me like it is inconsistent of our society to allow an exterminator to kill a living body, but we are squeamish about the disposal of it when it is not living. Why the wringing of hands over something that was legally destroyed? I think it is because the act becomes more real, visible, and noticeable when we learn that the garbage includes these dead little ones. The disposal of the remains becomes real to people who are comfortable with abortion as long as it stays in some "surgical center".

 

It seems to me like society still has a sense that there is something abhorrent about abortion. My position is that if it is too sacred to go in the garbage, maybe you should think about that before you support policies that allows the sacred thing to be murdered. But so called "pro-lifers" are inconsistent too. My boss insisted that he was as pro-life as anybody but that he didn't want to go back to the old days when it happened in backrooms and dark alleys. I said that was what I wanted. It got a little quiet. I suggested that if abortion is murder as we contend, it is always better that murders take place in back alleys and dark rooms. I am against murder, but since we have to have it, let's keep it in the dark where it belongs. But its academic. Since we have decided as a nation that abortion isn't murder, why are there limitations about how to dispose of the waste?

 

3DOP

 

PS: I am aware that I don't speak for the company and would make that plain to anybody who speaks to me. I asked my boss about church members who know my line of work, does the silent treatment extend to them? No. I can talk to them. I think its okay to talk here too, especially since I haven't even named the company, and deliberately so. Nobody from the news is going to find me anyway, and in the end, I agreed to let my boss know if I do talk to anyone.         

[Bill “Papa” Lee]

?

what is you question TSS?

[thesometimesaint]

what is you question TSS?

 

I don't know what you mean by "Sad the gov't does not work well, nor can see the problems it creates. To quote the scriptures; "To be learned is not to be wise".".