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The Real Body Snatchers
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC are reporting on a grisly trade lying behind the booming business for replacement body parts in medical procedures. Many unscrupulous "dealers" will procure body parts from anyone willing to deal them — e.g., undertakers, medics — and will process them for resale onto legitimate companies. Apparently a fully processed cadaver can fetch up to $250,000. Now, who says I'm worth more alive than dead?"
In his Gil "The Arm" Hamilton stories (collected in Flatlander ) Larry Niven speculated that once organ transplants were common, the government would end up making everything, even jaywalking, merit the death penalty to insure a good supply of organs. China has already started using organs from executed prisoners, how long before it spreads to India and even the West?
On the other hand, Niven did foresee an end to organlegging with the rise of alloplasty ("gadgets instead of organs"). Of course, in Niven's timeline that only happened in A Gift from Earth (republished in Three Books of Known Space IIRC), after hundreds of years of murders for organs, but we're already seeing exciting reports in tech news of progress in artificial parts, so maybe the barbarity of e.g. China's treatment of prisoners will pass fairly soon.
A recent staple of science fiction is the story of people optioning their body parts for money while they're still living (companies pay you based on the value of said parts and the odds that your body will still be intact at death and not crushed in a car accident or something). Personally, I think this is not so unlikely as many science fiction scenarios. After all, about the only thing standing in the way are medical ethics regulations, and when times get tight, you can bet that corruption will put a stop to those.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
How about this very recent article, also from BBC. The crime they describe is blood donations (for cash) from a farm of living people.
This is not my sig
Sounds unlikely to me: freezing destroys the cells. That's why transplantations are time critical.
Yup, you're worth a lot of money dead. To everyone but you. Imagine if _you_ had the right to decide to sell your corpse for a profit, the good you could do: You could leave that money to your family, donate it to charities. You could also do wonders to eliminate the organ donor waiting list -- if, presumably, you could directly sell your organs to folks willing to pay for them.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
You have described one of the big concerns, but there's another even larger concern regarding health care. We have structured our health care system to provide care to everyone and to try as hard as we can to keep people alive. We change how bill collectors treat medical debt, we force hospitals to heal illegal immigrants at the cost of taxpayers, we demand that the elderly be given some form of care even when they are old, chronically ill, and broke. It's like the adversarial system for lawyers; we protect the lawyers so they fight as hard as they can for their clients and don't have to worry about clients withholding useful information for fear of guilt. We want our doctors and nurses and emts to be driven into the field to help people. When these black markets spring up and take hold with lots of available money, it motivates the wrong people, and makes the right person make the wrong decision because the opportunity is available. I shouldn't worry that the emt at the accident scene is checking my kidney health as they are worth some bucks; he should worry about my blood loss or head trauma first!
"Stiff" by Mary Roach. Goes into extensive detail about just how many uses dead bodies have. A few: forensics (letting them decay and recording what sorts of insects colonize them and when, which gives immense amounts of data to people who are trying to analyze time-of-death, also covered extensively in "A Fly For The Prosecution" by Madison Goff, and other books.
Safety testing: putting corpses in cars and crashing them gives much better results on skull fractures and such than Buster The Dummy. Likewise, dropping corpses in elevators or off buildings into safety nets, or measuring the protective qualities of bullet-proof jackets. It's hard to get good results using pigs.
(I saw Mary Roach read from this book one time, and it was creepy, not because of her and the book, but because just about everyone in the audience ended up asking really detailed, scary questions about treatment of dead bodies, since apparently most of them had experience in the subject.)
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Something which is not very well known but probably is an instance of one of the largest violation of human rights and illegal harvesting and sale of human body parts, and which are healthy and normal body parts that are being illegally and unethically removed from the bodies of millions of children every year is circumcision. Foreskins, which are a normal and healthy part of the human body and for which there is no justifiable or medically sound and valid rationale for removing a normal and healthy part of the human body that has no medical diseases whatsoever, are harvested from young children, and then are sold to corporations, including pharmacuetical companies, where they are used to manufacture cosmetics and for testing. SkinMedica is one such product which is made from foreskin fibroblasts, and which has been promoted by Oprah Winfrey, who apparently is aware that a major component of the product is human neonatal foreskins stolen from genitally mutilated boys. Ironically, Oprah's show in the past has decried female circumcision. I suppose from Oprah's point of view, the genital mutilation and destruction of parts of boys anatomy is acceptable, this is only unacceptable when done to girls, since apparently only girls deserve to be protected from demeaning, dehumanising genital mutilations, torture and assault. Apparently girls are entitled to more rights to a whole body than boys are.
If a person, as an adult, wants to be circumcised, male or female, they are free to make that choices for themselves, with fully informed consent. it should be the right of the person to make their own choices about removals of normal and undiseased parts of their bodies. It is a basic human right to physical integrity, and unless we uphold a medical standard and universal principle which requires an actual medical abnormality to be present on the part to removed from an unconsenting, this right is not being honoured and respected, and as well, we have no standard to define what is an assault. Any clear assault could be made permissable by society at its own whim, even if it is to the detriment of individual rights. Since circumcision cannot be undone and what is taken cannot be gotten back, the decision should be the person whose body it is, since only they will be able to decide what is best for them. Perhaps some men prefer to remain intact for aesthetic reasons or to retain full sensitivity. We should do what gives the individual the most freedom, since all rights and liberties are based in the individual. Parents do not have a right to do anything to their children and their responsibilities are to protect their children from harm. Children are not extensions of their parents bodies and children do have human rights which are seperate from the parents and are considered seperate, individual persons. Removing or destroying a healthy and undiseased part of a childs body is considered child abuse and it is an assault upon the child by definition , circumcision is a removal of a healthy and undiseased part of the childs body. Removals of parts of the body are permenant and cannot be undone later. A person can always change their beliefs later on, but they cannot undo damage to their body if they did not want this. Therefore, removal of normal parts of human anatomy should be deferred to a time when the person is of the age they can make with fully informed consent these decisions for themselves. The foreskin is a normal and healthy part of the human anatomy and has been a part of the anatomy of mammals and their predecessors for over 100 million years. All mammals have foreskins, including both males and females.
Of course we already know that male or female circumcision is an invalid and wrong genital mutilation of children, since it violates medical ethics. Everyone has a basic human right to a whole body, and to not have parts of their body removed without their consent unless there is a serious, critical, present and current medical condition on that part and where removing it is necessary to treat that medical ab