Boulder Abortion Clinic director Dr. Warren Hern, who had no idea the mortuary working with his clinic had been sending ashes to Sacred Heart of Mary Church, said the decision was "a cynical exploitation of private grief for political purposes."
Chuck Myers, the director of Crist Mortuary, has an agreement with the clinic to collect and cremate tissue and had been giving the ashes to the church since 2001. Myers also delivered ashes to the parish for three years in the mid-1990s while working as a funeral home director, said parish volunteer Susan LaVelle.
"What was going to happen to those ashes if we didn't pick them up? Would they be thrown away? I hope my words would never harm someone. My message is one of healing," LaVelle told The Denver Post in Friday's editions.
The arrangement does not violate state law, Department of Public Health spokesman Glenn Mallory said. Women who have abortions in Colorado are allowed to dispose of the fetal remains. If they choose not to, funeral homes or medical-waste facilities do so.
Saturday is the anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion.
LaVelle said Sunday's ceremony would involve the remains of between 600 and 1,000 aborted fetuses from November 2003 through and November 2004. She said the parish has held unannounced burials twice a year since 2001, but the parish priest agreed to make the burial public this year.
"Abortion can be a real controversial issue, but in my eyes and the eyes of people doing this in our church, we believe these babies deserve the dignity of a proper burial," LaVelle said.
Kate Horle, spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, said most of Hern's patients have fetuses with fatal anomalies. His clinic specializes in "late abortion for fetal disorders," according to its Web site.
"These women are devastated," Horle said. "To discover that an entity is essentially taking it upon themselves to create a religious service that may not be acceptable to the family is probably really painful."
