Frankenstien and Planned Parenthood

You don't say much for the parents do you? Children should be raised to take care of themselves.

I know you prefer telling them they are victims and the world owes them a living, or a dying from an irresponsible act, which the government will pay for also.

You don't improve a society that way, you destroy it.

Who knows maybe the JOOOS are behind it.

As usual the point went right over your head.

You don't have a point. You are just whining that some people think personal responsibility and working for a living is a good idea. And that pregnancy is easily avoided with birth control, which is free.

But I guess it is easier to be irresponsible and have others pay for killing your baby because you can. And with the blessing of progressive ethnic cleansers, starting with Margret Sanger.

Like I said you lying piece of shyt. The point went right over your head. I keep forgetting you have the intelligence quotient of an amoeba.

The rhetoric you spout is not a point, it must be on your head. Although I imagined it more pin like.

Good.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/10/19/texas-cuts-off-medicaid-funding-to-planned-parenthood/

A point is what his head is shaped as. Coincidentally enough.

So long as there are options, I see no problem here.

There are plenty of options. PP sets up in minority neighborhoods for convenience and profit. With a minimal effort by those seeking care they can get it somewhere else.

You won't be able to reply, dumbass, because you've been suspended yet again.

Coroners have been harvesting and selling parts for YEARS and YEARS and YEARS. Where do you think corneas come from?

Inside the Business of Selling Human Body Parts

Photo: Christian Weber

Is the human body sacred? Or is it a commodity ready to be chopped up and exposed to the forces of supply and demand? The answer is a matter of perspective. Our own body is a temple. But when we need a spare part, suddenly we’re surprisingly open to a transaction. To a person looking for a kidney, a scientist trying to learn anatomy, a beauty parlor customer looking for the perfect ‘do, there’s no substitute for a piece of someone else.

The problem is, demand for replacement flesh grossly outstrips supply. In the US and like-minded countries, it’s illegal to sell body parts—they can be taken only from those who filled out a donor card before they died or who are willing to give up an organ out of sheer benevolence. This means there isn’t enough tissue to go around. So, as with any outlawed or heavily regulated resource, a bustling underground trade has formed.

Sometimes the market in body parts is exploitive: Desperate people are paid tiny sums for huge donations. Other times it is ghoulish: Pieces are stolen from the recently dead. And every so often, the resource grab is lethal—people are simply killed for their organs. Welcome to the red market.

Photos: Christian Weber

Illustrations: Istvan Orosz

Until the 1970s, for-profit blood-collection centers were located in almost every poor neighborhood, somewhat like payday loan centers are today. This changed after a study showed that paid donations encourage lax standards. As a result, the rules were modified and blood and organs can no longer be sold. At least not here. In the developing world, there are still profits to be made. In 2008, blood thieves in India were busted for keeping people prisoner and milking their blood up to three times a week. Some captives had been held for more than two years.

The liver is amazingly resilient; even a badly damaged one can fully regenerate on its own. But when there’s an excessive buildup of scar tissue, a person will need a transplant. The good news is that a patient may not need a whole new organ: Because of the liver’s fortitude, just a healthy lobe may be enough. This means living donors are possible. The bad news is that, for the living donor, recovery can be excruciating, so donors aren’t common. Executed Chinese prisoners are one source of black-market livers. Or organ brokers can set you up in the Philippines, where illicit donations likely come from those desperate for cash.

In the late 1970s, Gunther von Hagens revolutionized the study of anatomy by changing the way specimens were prepared. Instead of immersing dead bodies in a preservative, he replaced their fat and water with polymer, turning corpses into plastic statues. Plastination exposed the body’s internal structures and greatly enhanced researchers’ ability to study them. It also led to several traveling exhibition shows. An investigation into those shows revealed that many bodies were likely coming from executed prisoners.

Scott Carney (scottcarney.com) is a contributing editor at Wired. His forthcoming book The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers comes out in June.

Harvest of Corneas at Morgue Questioned

Corneas taken without survivors' permission are resold at huge markup by eye bank, which pays coroner's office a fee. The practice is legal, but critics cite ethical lapses.

November 02, 1997|RALPH FRAMMOLINO | TIMES STAFF WRITER

A renowned eye bank has paid more than $1 million during the last five years to the Los Angeles County coroner's office in exchange for thousands of corneas, harvested without the permission or knowledge of the families of the dead.

More, LOTS more at:

http://articles.latimes.com/1997/nov/02/news/mn-49420/2

Although the practice is permitted under a little-known state law, officials of the coroner's office and Doheny Eye & Tissue Transplant Bank have used the statute so extensively that critics say the morgue has become a virtual cornea mill.

"Totally immoral," is how former Doheny technician Julia Brain described what is happening behind the coroner's doors--and behind the backs of families.

"Repugnant," said former coroner supervisor Peter Linder.

Under the 14-year-old state law, coroners are allowed to remove corneas in cases targeted for autopsy if there are no known objections from the next of kin.

When the law was passed, there was a shortage of corneas and long waits for people seeking transplants of the dome-like tissue that covers the eye's colored iris. Speed was of the essence because corneas usually disintegrate within 24 hours after death. For that reason, coroner officials are not specifically required under the law to seek time-consuming permission.

There is no doubt that the wide availability of corneas has helped thousands of people overcome a variety of vision-impairing maladies. But a mounting number of medical experts say the law is unnecessary today because corneas are so plentiful that none need be procured without the blessings of loved ones.

San Francisco Medical Examiner Boyd Stephens, for one, said he will not allow cornea removals without family approval. He said surveys by his office have shown that even people willing to donate internal organs draw the line at eyes.

"When you think of somebody you know, you envision their face, their eyes and nose," Stephens said. "You don't identify anybody by their liver."

In Los Angeles, that has not deterred coroner's and eye bank officials, who say they have been guided only by humanitarian concerns and the dictates of the law.

An investigation by The Times has revealed that the coroner's office and Doheny are invoking the state measure on an unprecedented scale. This has generated a cheap source of corneas that the eye bank resells for a markup of more than 1,200%. In return, the cash-strapped morgue receives payments of about $250,000 a year.

In all, at least half of Doheny's corneas--more than 1,000 annually--come from coroner cases in which consent has not been obtained, a number unmatched by any eye bank in the state.

Along the way, critics and medical experts say, ethical lapses and procedural breakdowns have occurred.

Internal documents, a computer analysis of hundreds of coroner cases and scores of interviews disclosed that:

* Employees of the coroner's office and the eye bank say they have been discouraged by superiors from asking permission of family members, even when easily accessible at death scenes, through the police or by telephone. In that way, no objections can be lodged and the corneas can be harvested under the state's so-called Coroners Law.

* The eye bank's employees are under such intense pressure to procure corneas that their productivity has been charted on monthly bar graphs. Earlier this year, when the numbers dipped, a veiled warning of possible "downsizing" was issued by the president of Doheny's management organization, Tissue Banks International, a driving force behind the 1983 Coroners Law.

* The ties between Doheny and the coroner's office are extremely close--some say incestuously so. The morgue's former director is now a key executive of Tissue Banks International. In recent years, Doheny has hired relatives of pathologists working for the coroner's office. At times, full-time morgue employees have moonlighted for Doheny. Some of the eye bank's technicians have their own keys to the coroner's office, giving them free run of the facility and its investigative files.

* Contrary to federal health-safety guidelines, Doheny technicians have removed corneas from people recently incarcerated and from drug users--high-risk candidates for infectious viruses, including hepatitis and AIDS. In addition, no family or medical histories are sought to discover other possible health dangers. Although chances of disease transmission through corneal transplants are extremely remote, most eye banks and coroners outside Los Angeles say they prefer to err on the side of safety.

Doheny and the eye bank's management firm, both of which are listed as nonprofit organizations, say they not only have complied with the law but have been motivated solely by a genuine desire to help those with vision that has been impaired by such things as cataract surgery and scarring from accidents and infections.

The Coroners Law, according to Doheny Executive Director Jeffrey A. Thomas, "enables everyone with need [for] the rapid access to sight-restoring corneas."

Commerce in Cadavers Open Secret

Checkout: Reclamationgallery.com

Vernellia R. Randall
Professor of Law
Michele Goodwin
Los Angeles Times Op-Ed
March 11, 2004

Are we shocked that a University of California official has been caught allegedly trading in body parts? We shouldn't be; UCLA is simply the canary in the coal mine. It's an open secret that there has long been a commercial trade in human bodies.

An underground, illegal market has developed largely because of inconsistent federal policies and practices, including poor oversight of university hospitals, organ procurement organizations and biotechnology companies that engage in the exchange of body parts.

By and large, this black market serves a public good by supplying lifesaving and beneficial materials — such as heart valves and knees — to a demanding public. But without regulation and monitoring, it's not surprising that mistakes, fraud and abuse occur, as they did in the California case of infected tissues being sold to hospitals for knee transplants in 2002, or the 1997 scandal in which the Los Angeles coroner's office was found to have sold more than 500 pairs of corneas in one year to the Doheny Eye & Tissue Transplant Bank.

In the Doheny case, more than 80% of the donors, who were unwittingly placed in the stream of commerce, were black or Latino. The coroner's office received up to $335 per pair of corneas, which Doheny resold at $3,400 per pair. The coroner was not alone in this behavior; 29 states permitted the nonconsensual removal of eye tissues from cadavers. Most of the 29 still have presumed consent laws.

Currently, the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act and the National Organ Transplantation Act prohibit companies and private citizens from purchasing body parts from individuals. An individual cannot receive "payment" for donating an organ or other body part. Although hints of the existence of a market involving individual sellers are clearly apparent in sperm and ova sales, lawmakers have been slow to address this new, expanded marketplace. Such inaction drives the underground sales.

Although the laws allow "service" fees to be exchanged between hospitals and organ procurement organizations for body parts and cadavers used to promote research, those fees have come to resemble illegal payments. Hospitals, organ procurement organizations and universities have become middlemen in the human-parts supply industry, violating the spirit and legislative intent of the regulations, because they are selling body parts that will be used commercially and not for research. For-profit tissue banks and biotechnology firms engage in research, but their function is dual-purpose and, ultimately, they are beholden to shareholders who are interested in profits.

Federal oversight has been lax at best, and courts are seemingly unprepared to deal with the reality of a growing body market. State and circuit court decisions on the question of who owns the body have been inconsistent.. Both individuals whose cell lines had been stolen and people who have donated family members' cadavers have sought legal remedies. State courts in Georgia and California have ruled against their claims for compensation for nonconsensual appropriation of body parts, while the federal 6th and 9th circuit courts have recognized at least a quasi property-right interest in the body.

In the UCLA case, do the sold body parts now belong to the tissue banks, UCLA or the new owners, or can they revert to the families? Can the families be compensated for their loss? Courts are stumped. Federal law proscribes individual ownership, yet a billion-dollar-a-year corporate industry thrives on buying, refashioning and selling body parts. From where, federal officials should ask, do they obtain the body parts?

Instead of ignoring the growing human-tissue industry, Congress, through the Food and Drug Administration, should regulate and monitor these exchanges. The essential elements of an informed system would include donor protections, an option for donor compensation, recourse for misrepresentation and mandatory annual reporting of donor/provider information, including race, gender and age data to prevent predatory practices. Finally, the federal government must also clarify its role in funding programs that sell body parts.

While the challenge to overhaul altruistic donations occupies lawmakers, private actors have developed a thriving black market. Thus the challenge, it seems, is whether to refashion altruism or introduce other supply alternatives with standards and regulations.


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Michele Goodwin is the director of the Health Law Institute, DePaul University College of Law.