It’s difficult to imagine what coping with losing a child feels like but it is almost impossible to imagine what it feels like to be told years afterwards – in some case as many as 45 years later – that someone denied you the ashes of that child and simply discarded them instead.
As unlikely as this scenario sounds this is what has been happening for almost half a century at Mortonhall Crematorium in Edinburgh. It recently came to light that the council run crematorium’s policy was to tell parents of small babies, some of which were still births, that there would be no ashes to collect. In some cases this may have been true, although experts have since come forward to say there will always be ashes, even from the tiniest of babies, and in other cases this was complete fabrication with the ashes then being buried in a garden of remembrance.
This process of discarding the ashes was done with absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of the parents who are now embroiled in a legal battle and public campaign to find out what happened to their own child after its death.
Thompsons has been working closely with the parents of this horrific baby ashes scandal since the information became public last year and has vowed to help them fight for justice.
