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Organs of UK Nuclear Workers Secretly Harvested; Energy Secretary Apologizes
fernlyn writes with word of a report detailing a decades-long practice of clandestine post-mortem organ removal from the bodies of dozens of workers in the UK's nuclear energy industry; Britain's Energy Secretary Chris Huhne has apologized to the families of those workers whose organs were taken without consent or even acknowledgement. Many of the organs taken were removed without any apparent forensic purpose in mind. Surviving relatives are understandably upset with what they see as cavalier treatment of their loved ones' bodies (even beyond unauthorized organ removal), such as the replacement of bones with lengths of broomstick.
Anyone who has been remotely connected with the British civil service will understand that, unlike even the United States in an increasingly dwindling number of areas, there is no real sense of government serving the people. The government exists to manage the unwashed masses and knows what is good for you, even while every individual understands that the government is really serving itself. This notion of nanny leadership is even woven into the undergraduate experience at Oxford, where the nation's managers are bred (and probably Cambridge too): if you have any sense of egalitarianism, it is repulsive but difficult to ignore.
Property rights.
Your body is your most important piece of property. If the government can just go around "cavalierly" doing whatever it wants with your body, how can one say that they live in a just society?
It makes no difference when your dead if your organs are in a jar, cremated, or rotting in the earth.
Cool; so when someone close to you dies they wont mind if I come along and urinate on their body before the funeral? Given what you just wrote you wont object to that right?
It's about the living; and respect; doofus.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
It makes no difference when your dead if your organs are in a jar, cremated, or rotting in the earth.
Maybe it makes no difference to you when you are dead, but a whole lot of people in this world have quite strong feelings about the right way to treat a persons body once they are deceased, and rational or not, those feelings are very real and should be respected.
To take what you said to the ridiculous, if one of your kids died and the doctor cut them into pieces, removed the contents of their head, and used it like a puppet, would you be upset? I would be, and upset is putting it very lightly.
"Cool; so when someone close to you dies they wont mind if I come along and urinate on their body before the funeral?"
Not really. They're dead, why would I care?
With all due respect, I believe you are being dishonest for the sake of argumentation. Feelings towards loved ones don't just magically disappear at the moment of death.
Unless you don't have any feelings to begin with, which is still a possibility. By being a psychopath, for instance.
As much as it was a cabal of ghoulish bodysnatchers with God complexes who thought they were above the law. You know, typical medics. 99.5% of them give the rest a bad name.
And I re-iterate my position: if criminal acts were performed, individuals should be prosecuted. If the relatives are going to sue anyone for anything (what? emotional distress?) then it should be the individuals, not the State. The State doesn't care if it has to rob Peter a bit more to hush up Paul.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
So to prevent people from illegaly using my dead body as an organ buffet, I have to register to let people legally use my dead body as an organ buffet?
Nice one.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
When did we start excusing governments and other authority figures from law? The US president is ordered to hand over emails, and he apologizes and "loses" them. The Catholic church is accused of covering up years of sexual child abuse, and the Pope apologizes. The British government steals organs and desecrates corpses, and someone apologizes.
How about giving these people the same consequences as if it was one of us "normal" people doing these acts? Are you trying to imply that we wouldn't have the full weight of the law fall on us? Are you saying we could get away with just saying "I'm sorry?". This has to stop, it's the path to despotism.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"How dare you take the organs out, they were supposed to feed the worms".
There may not be a good logical rationale to keep a dead body intact, but there are religious reasons.
For a religious person, a deceased body desecrated might mean a deceased soul spending eternity in hell as opposed to heaven. Which, in their believes, would be a very negative emotional situation.
I'm not religious, like many others on Slashdot, but that does not mean we get to decide how religious people should feel or what they should believe in, just like religious people shouldn't be allowed to tell others what to feel and believe. Even if we could, we wouldn't be very succesfull.
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