LOS ANGELES — Tucked against a fence in an East Los Angeles cemetery, a long, flat headstone reads: “In memory of the 16,500 precious unborn, buried here, Oct. 6, 1985.”
The aborted fetuses had been found in a metal storage container repossessed from the Woodland Hills home of a former medical laboratory owner who had kept them after testing.
The debate back then was a preview of a new front in the battle over abortion today. Over the last two years, at least five states have introduced requirements that healthcare facilities bury or cremate the remains from abortions, and in some cases also from miscarriages and stillbirths.
The rules in Arkansas and North Carolina have already taken effect. Texas, Louisiana and Indiana are embroiled in lawsuits challenging their regulations, with a decision in the Texas case expected as soon as this week.
In those three states, court-ordered injunctions or legal negotiations have put most of the new rules on hold, though not all. Women who suffer miscarriages at hospitals in Indiana are now required to fill out forms specifying whether they intend to arrange a private cremation or burial, or if the hospital should dispose of the remains through a mass cremation.
The new regulations vary by state, but the basic idea is the same: the remains of the unborn must be treated like the remains of the born.
“A civil society does not throw the bodies of human beings into a landfill,” said Kristi Hamrick, a spokeswoman for the Washington-based Americans United for Life, which has drafted model legislation it hopes other states will adopt. Its proposals are about “showing respect to human beings who have died before birth, no matter how that came about, by abortion, miscarriage or stillbirth,” she wrote in an email.
But advocates for abortion rights say that is an ideological viewpoint that the state has no business imposing on women.
Currently, most hospitals and abortion clinics contract with professional companies to dispose of fetal and embryonic tissue according to the protocols governing medical waste. Although rules vary from state to state, that typically means incinerating the remains, or through a sterilization process, before placing them in landfills.
A number of states already have laws allowing grieving families to take possession of remains, if they want to hold funerals. The new rules enter more controversial terrain by requiring healthcare facilities to treat fetal remains in a similar way to dead bodies, even for pregnancies that last just a couple weeks.
The regulations signed into law last March by Mike Pence, then governor of Indiana and now vice president, are the most restrictive. They mandate burial or cremation, whether the remains are from an abortion, miscarriage or stillbirth.
The new mandates are the latest move by conservative lawmakers to test the limits of the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that legalized abortion.
But for abortion rights advocates, the ruling came too late: More than half of the state’s 41 abortion clinics had already closed, and some may never reopen.
The advocates worry that the new fetal disposition rules could put even more providers out of business.