The shocking announcement that doesn't shock

Do something wrong, and you feel terrible. Do it a second time, and you don't feel quite so bad. Make a habit of it, and you can quite get used to it.

Just over a week ago, it was announced that 10 NHS trusts had admitted incinerating the bodies of aborted babies with clinical waste. Two other trusts had burned the bodies in "waste-to-energy" plants to heat hospitals. (I wrote about the matter here.) It did not cause much of a commotion.

Peter Hitchens writes: "It is what doesn't shock us that is now so shocking. Not all that long ago, news that aborted babies were being burned in furnaces to heat hospitals would have caused a major national storm.

"But in our callous, distracted and unimaginative society, it passed by like a momentary gust of cold wind on a warm day, faintly disturbing but swiftly forgotten. . .

"What has happened to us that we no longer really care, either about the massacre of the innocents that goes on day and night in our midst, or about the disposal of human remains as if they were rubbish?

"Lots of people must have known, and found it convenient. But in this matter we are really a bit like the respectable inhabitants of Hitler's Germany, who vaguely noticed that people were loaded on to eastbound trains and didn't come back, were vaguely concerned for a moment and then returned to their normal lives. . . 

"Whoever sets out to destroy any class of humanity will always begin by claiming that his victims aren't really human. . . The lie has to be sustained by hiding the truth.

"We have pretended so hard and so long that it isn't so, that people, who no doubt viewed themselves as kind and decent, were able to shovel violently abused human remains into a furnace, and then go home happy."

Talking about abortion, there is an international organisation named 40 Days for Life which uses prayer, fasting and peaceful clinic witness in an attempt to do away with abortion. On the 27th day of their present 40-day campaign, 321 babies had been saved from the abortionist's knife.

A leader of the organisation reports that he visited a meeting at a small town in Michigan, where three pastors spoke and led prayer about abortion. Which leads to the question: where in a small town in Britain would you find three pastors who would speak and lead prayer about abortion?