I'm going to get blasted for this, but I feel it should be said anyway. Keep in mind, it's only my opinion.
I don't often lash out at people for what is in essence, a religious belief or a cultural norm, even if it isn't my belief of norm. Instead, I try to look at my own accepted customs and try to see them from the outside.
If I am understanding correctly, this was only babies that had died in utero or during delivery, correct? None of these children were killed simply to be covered in gold leaf. I would feel differently if they were killed on purpose. However, look at what we do to children that die at advanced gestation or shortly after they are born. Often we autopsy them. We embalm them. We bury them or cremate them. Think of this from an outside perspective. We take an infant that has passed, cut it's tiny body open to examine every organ, then we remove the blood, organs, and other fluids from that tiny corpse, and replace them with chemicals and other artificial things to make the body last longer. Then we bury that body in the ground where it will be rained on, snowed on, allowed to decay, and only acknowledged occassionally. Or we burn it, and then put the ashes on our mantel so we can talk to that tiny corpse.
Are other practices really that much sicker than our own, when seen from outside the situation? Personally, I think that our treatment is just as bad if not worse, than dry roasting and coating with gold leaf. We don't just dry roast our corpses, we go a step further with full cremation. And the caskets that we choose to bury our dead, most are ornate, decorated, very pretty boxes, in fact some even have gold leaf as adornment. This practice just removes the box from the equation. I'm not saying that it's right, or that I support the practice...just that our rituals are just as sick when seen by someone that comes from a culture that does things differently.
Go ahead, flame away. I'm a big girl, I can take it, LOL.
