>The hospitals told Reuters in recent weeks they made their decisions on ethical grounds. The move comes amid investigations by U.S. law enforcement into some so-called body brokers - companies that obtain the dead, often through donation, dissect them and sell the parts for profit.
What really gets me is the “for profit”, especially since these are organ donors.
They get their “merchandise” for free from the last goodwill of people. If not, apparently they’ll offer free cremation to families to convince them to agree to donating the organs— since they have to dispose of the corpse anyway this is probably just an expense they’d have to pay regardless.
And then they sell this donation for profit. This is baffling.
> they’ll offer free cremation to families to convince them to agree to donating the organs— since they have to dispose of the corpse anyway this is probably just an expense they’d have to pay regardless.
Um, no? If they aren't given custody of the body, they don't have to dispose of the corpse. The family would have to do that.
Which isn't that different to how many "charitable" organizations are actually for-profit organizations.
Another example of this would be clothing donations. Most people donate clothing with the expectation that it will be given to the needy for free. When in reality, these second-hand clothes will usually be sold to traders who then retail them in developing countries [0], undercutting the domestic competition who can't compete with the massive influx of "free" clothing.
> Although the declared value of the head on the customs form was $25, the going rate for a human head in the U.S. market is currently around $500, Reuters found
The body gets "scavenged", and then it gets cremated. The ash people get in an urn or necklace is very, very little amount of the total amount of ash.
I carry a donor, and I want to be cremated as well (since I find it pathetic to use land after I passed away). If I die, I want whoever is left on Earth to benefit from my legacy. Mainly my family, but also others who are in need. I'd only be grateful if someone else would do the same for me if they'd pass away.
This is why I support the modernisation that being a donor is opt-out in 2019 instead of opt-in (in NL).
As far as I'm concerned, those who are donor get priority over those who are not donor, to avoid leeches (akin to people who don't vaccinate who benefit from those who do).
I find this potentially very dangerous because this may motivate people who are supposed to save you to value the value of your body parts over the value of your life.
Not judging you [1] but I do find that a very misanthropic view of humankind.
Those who save you are unable to know beforehand to whom your body parts are going to get used to. Doctors don't even know this beforehand either. Perhaps if you got very rare characteristics.
I've had to make the decision in the past to give my father, who was already very ill, one of my kidneys. That's a very difficult and emotional decision to make...
[1] I used to be not a registered donor because I didn't want anyone except my nearest family members to know about this. However, knowing about it right after death because it is in your wallet or registered on the internet can save lives.
I do not find myself misanthropic but I do not live in an idealistic bubble.
It does not matter if doctors know who would use your body parts. They even may be idealistic - you may help to save multiple lives. So they will make a decision, even perhaps subconscious, between your life and those potential saved lives.
There is a nice scene at the beginning of Dr Strange movie about this.
There should be some checks and balances so that the doctors will not become butchers. Perhaps the need to get an agreement of a close relative.
> since I find it pathetic to use land after I passed away
You aen't using it up. You, or your heirs, etc., just rent the plot for a while. Where I live every resident is entitled to a plot in the local churchyard for twenty years, if you, or your family, want more then you pay a fee for more years. The town has been in existence for at least two hundred years yet the size of the graveyard increases only as the population increases. My wife's ashes were buried there last year and there is room on the gravestone for my name and that of my children if they want it so it could be occupied for another hundred years. However, it is more likely that twenty years after my death the plot will be reused by another family.
This occupies about one square metre. The house I live in occupies about 900 square metres of land so I don't think my wife's ashes are occupying a disproportionate amount of space.
Don't take this as criticism, just another point of view.
I live in a dense country, I'd rather see the space and money get used for other things such as a playground, or directly to my daughter, or an NGO such as BOF (national equiv to EFF).
I guess this must be a regional thing dependent on population density. Where I live in the US, I have seen plots from my ancestors who died 150 years ago. I've never known of any relatives whose plots have been reused. Though the rate at which cemeteries are created/expanded is much lower than I would expect, even accounting for the fact that only ~50% of the population is buried. I've often wondered how to explain the discrepancy...
In the US, burial plots being for a single individual forever is the norm. Cemeteries basically build up a fund to pay for maintenance in perpetuity. What you describe is more the norm in Europe, I don’t know about elsewhere.
> From 2012 to 2016, according to manifest records reviewed by Reuters, MedCure shipped body parts valued at a total of more than $500,000 from the United States to the Netherlands. MedCure said it helps connect donors and scientific, research and medical entities. "We are an accredited and regulated institution and adhere to the best-in-class industry standards for safety ethics, and transparency," the company said in a statement to Reuters.
Followed by:
> Freek Dikkers, the professor of ear, nose and throat medicine at the AMC whose department bought the heads, said it was stopping after learning that the company solicits donors at hospices and old age homes and that its former owners earned millions from the trade. Dikkers said that was “unacceptable.”
Something does not add up. How can you be a champion of "transparency" while your clients ignore (or pretend to ignore?) how you source the parts?
Matching a transparency standard doesn't mean you're transparent. It means you successfully ticked boxes that should provide incentives for transparency.
None of Dikkers' complains were transparency related.
1. Isn't it obvious whether a head is old?
2. How often are old heads removed from bodies without illness?
3. Dikkers doesn't believe in free-market commerce under a low-tax regime. That's his choice, but that means he shouldn't buy anything from an American or multinational corporation.
This isn't the first time. There was a scandal with blood donors. Its illegal in the Netherlands to sell your blood but blood banks were importing blood from the US.
Poor people shouldn't have to resort to selling their body.
Blood replenishes though. It's not really a body part in that way, just like hair. (I don't know if regular donation has any long-term effects?) In that sense (no permanent impact) I'd see a greater problem with poverty driving people into working as miners or soldiers, than as blood donors.
Semantics aside, the real problem is the (desperation of) poverty, not the results of it.
So selling your hair is a problem too? Surrogate mothers? Do you even think that a poor person has the same quality of healthcare as a rich person has? All these bans just showcase bad manners and bad leftist ideology.
Blood is not really a body part in the way most people think of it. It’s much closer to saliva in that it’s generated by the body and used up fairly quickly. Red blood cells for example live for around 120 days which is limited because they don’t have DNA.
I suspect this is an adaptation to both increase hemoglobin transport, but also to reduce cancer risks.
The human body suffers just as much from wear and tear like anything else, maybe even more so due to being just a bunch of flesh/bones that can't be easily replaced.
In that context, anybody who works hard labor is trading in part of their health for income because many labor-intensive jobs will take their toll on the body [0]. Up to a point where people either have to switch line of work or go into early retirement, as certain parts of their body stop functioning properly and they are stuck with chronic pains for the remainder of their lives.
> The human body suffers just as much from wear and tear like anything else, maybe even more so due to being just a bunch of flesh/bones that can't be easily replaced.
The human body is amazingly reliable, no comparison to "dead" (non-self-sustaining, non-self-renuvating) machines.
Since the subject is the Netherlands, I have a hard time reconciling the position that it should be legal to sell one's body (prostitution) but illegal to sell one's body (blood, marrow, cadavers, organs upon death).
Only via a linguistic trick. We could expand that argument to suggest that poor people shouldn’t ever have to work for a living - labour is, of course, selling your body.
Not "only" via a linguistic trick. There are several philosophies that hold that there is something special about each human life that needs to be preserved. Some of those find prostitution, especially poverty driven varieties, to be a violation of that. Some of those find selling of body parts, especially poverty driven sales, to be a violation of that as well.
In other words, both stem from a belief in "human dignity".
A true belief in human dignity would also suggest that a massive amount of poorly-paid jobs that, of course, only people in poverty get forced into, should not exist, either. But that would require an overhaul of how we view work as a society, and we can live the happy lie of just banning sex work because some people think sex is specially important in a way that almost nothing else a human can do is.
There isn't really anything special about sex work, societal views on it aside. It's hard work, but for many people it causes no more harm to their dignity than anything else they could be doing.
Sure those two things sound similar when you write them like this, but they're completely different things. Prostitution is just another form of labor, with above-average health & safety dangers, and where legalization helps reduce those dangers. Selling body parts involves huge health risks and (beyond blood & marrow), permanent body damage and/or death of the seller. This is not something you absolutely don't want people to feel pressured into. It scales up to serious abuse and suffering.
I think "completely different" is overstating it. If the paternalistic instinct is to say people who sell body parts are prone to abuse, certainly the same can be said about prostitution. Similarly, if the average person is ill equipped to gauge risks and bear the consequences of poor risk management, then the calculus applies in sex (STIs, pregnancy, rape, etc.) and in organ donation.
Though the most interesting organ-based financial instruments would be rights to harvest organs post mortem, which several people in this thread seem to be overlooking.
And no matter how intellectually satisfying it would be if it were true, I don't think Western culture (or psychology in general) agrees with you that sex is just another service like computer repair. We don't have special categories of crimes for forced computer repair at gunpoint for instance. And we don't shame and fire overbearing bosses for pressuring employees into illicit computer repair.
Prostitution being legal is only in part about freedom. It also serves to enable law enforcement to ensure safe working conditions, sniff out human trafficking, criminals using underage sex workers and other crimes that are particular to this type of work. This would be much harder if the whole industry took place underground.
This part of the argument does not apply to the case of selling your body after death. Making it illegal to sell one's body after death seems more logical to me then.
The problem with blood donations is it's very expensive or impossible to test if the blood is clean. Therefore they rely on self reporting by the donors.
If blood instead was paid for people would be incentivized to lie, people desperate for cash wouldn't care about the consequences. For example junkies who might have all sorts of shit in their system.
I used to be more open to arguments like this, but then I listened to the Reply All episode about selling breast milk[0].
I think it's complicated. Poor people shouldn't need to "resort" to anything. We should have safety nets for people who are poor. But given that we don't have those safety nets, we should be at least a little cautious about removing mechanisms for them to help themselves, even if those mechanisms have potentially harmful elements.
I don't know what the current underground/black-market situation looks like for selling blood, but I don't take it as a given that a regulated market would be worse than what we have. I would need to see data that supported that conclusion before I jumped to it.
Should poor people only be able to give blood out of the goodness of their hearts? If someone saves my life with their blood should they not be compensated?
Poor people can sell their labor.
Poor people can sell sex in the Netherlands.
Why shouldn't they be able to sell other fluids?
Because they don't want your blood if you have a higher risk of diseases. You have to fill in a questionnaire with all kind of questions relating to your health, travels to other countries, your sex life, dug use and a few other things.
The idea is that you might not be completely honest if you get paid for your blood.
Have you done some coke last month? Just tell and nothing will happen, except you won't be donating any blood for the next 11 months.
Have you done some coke last month, but also really need money to feed your kids? It might be really tempting to lie and get that blood bank money anyway.
> Because they don't want your blood if you have a higher risk of diseases. You have to fill in a questionnaire with all kind of questions relating to your health, travels to other countries, your sex life, dug use and a few other things. The idea is that you might not be completely honest if you get paid for your blood.
I would much rather rely on testing donated blood than taking someone's word for it, no matter how much money they were or weren't paid.
They do test the blood, but the tests are not 100% accurate (no medical test like this is). Asking people helps reduce the need for these tests which helps reduce the accidents caused by inaccurate results. Give people an incentive to lie and these accident rates will go up. It's as simple as that.
The Dutch government (such as UWV) is using US cloud providers from which they cannot be sure to get privacy from. The Netherlands should become more independent from the USA, given the mutual benefit of allies is becoming more thin.
Even if you trust your cloud provider's intentions, you should never trust them with your privacy! If your cloud provider has access to your data, even if they never abuse it, all hackers have access as well. You should be uploading strongly encrypted data to the cloud, and assuming that anything decrypted in cloud could be viewed by an attacker.
Because they operate in another nation and are puppets to their government. What do you think will happen when the NSA asks for full access or when the US becomes enemy with the Netherlands?
Government and military cannot be outsourced overseas.
A lot of countries buy arms from the US. In fact I might even hazard to guess that the US is the world's largest arms supplier. Perhaps you are right, maybe the missiles will not work if fired in the wrong direction.
Apparently an NSA contractor has to type in a key before every start.
>Damit die 15 Eurofighter auch wirklich starten dürfen, zahlte Österreichs Bundesheer in drei Jahren 1,5 Millionen Euro an eine private US-Sicherheitsfirma: Jetzt wurden die Kosten für jene am Fliegerhorst Zeltweg stationierten zwei "Zivilisten" bestätigt, die jedes Aufsteigen eines Jets mit einem aktuellen US-"Crypto-Schlüssel" für die Navigation und die Freund-Feind-Erkennung zulassen müssen.
>In order for the 15 Eurofighters to start, Austria's federal army paid 1.5 million euros over three years to a private US security company. Now, the costs for those two "civilians" stationed at the Zeltweg air base have been confirmed, who have to allow every start with current US-"Crypto-Keys" for navigation and friend or foe identification.
The ministry of defense denies that the two Americans from a not named US company are NSA contractors. They claim the jets would fly without but without encrypted navigation and communication. He also mentions the same situation for Sweden and Switzerland.
"three New Jersey mayors, two state assemblymen and five rabbis were among more than 40 people arrested in New Jersey"
Mayor Peter J. Cammarano III of Hoboken, Mayor Dennis Elwell of Secaucus, both Democrats; Assemblyman L. Harvey Smith of Jersey City, also a Democrat; and Assemblyman Daniel M. Van Pelt, a Republican from Ocean County.
Apropos the US body market: there's a cartel that controls who gets body parts for research; life science startups find it tough to get human tissue for physiological research as the big companies and big research institutes end up with priority access.
It's a strange omission as all the other resources (vivaria, lab equipment, chemicals, APIs etc are easily purchasable).
83 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadIs this what peak capitalism looks like?
Does money have more value than humans, life, kids, health, freedom? If yes, them yes.
Oops, we're already there.
They get their “merchandise” for free from the last goodwill of people. If not, apparently they’ll offer free cremation to families to convince them to agree to donating the organs— since they have to dispose of the corpse anyway this is probably just an expense they’d have to pay regardless.
And then they sell this donation for profit. This is baffling.
Um, no? If they aren't given custody of the body, they don't have to dispose of the corpse. The family would have to do that.
Another example of this would be clothing donations. Most people donate clothing with the expectation that it will be given to the needy for free. When in reality, these second-hand clothes will usually be sold to traders who then retail them in developing countries [0], undercutting the domestic competition who can't compete with the massive influx of "free" clothing.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/sustainable...
Wait, what do they cremate then if they get to keep the body??
I carry a donor, and I want to be cremated as well (since I find it pathetic to use land after I passed away). If I die, I want whoever is left on Earth to benefit from my legacy. Mainly my family, but also others who are in need. I'd only be grateful if someone else would do the same for me if they'd pass away.
This is why I support the modernisation that being a donor is opt-out in 2019 instead of opt-in (in NL).
As far as I'm concerned, those who are donor get priority over those who are not donor, to avoid leeches (akin to people who don't vaccinate who benefit from those who do).
Those who save you are unable to know beforehand to whom your body parts are going to get used to. Doctors don't even know this beforehand either. Perhaps if you got very rare characteristics.
I've had to make the decision in the past to give my father, who was already very ill, one of my kidneys. That's a very difficult and emotional decision to make...
[1] I used to be not a registered donor because I didn't want anyone except my nearest family members to know about this. However, knowing about it right after death because it is in your wallet or registered on the internet can save lives.
It does not matter if doctors know who would use your body parts. They even may be idealistic - you may help to save multiple lives. So they will make a decision, even perhaps subconscious, between your life and those potential saved lives.
There is a nice scene at the beginning of Dr Strange movie about this.
There should be some checks and balances so that the doctors will not become butchers. Perhaps the need to get an agreement of a close relative.
You aen't using it up. You, or your heirs, etc., just rent the plot for a while. Where I live every resident is entitled to a plot in the local churchyard for twenty years, if you, or your family, want more then you pay a fee for more years. The town has been in existence for at least two hundred years yet the size of the graveyard increases only as the population increases. My wife's ashes were buried there last year and there is room on the gravestone for my name and that of my children if they want it so it could be occupied for another hundred years. However, it is more likely that twenty years after my death the plot will be reused by another family.
This occupies about one square metre. The house I live in occupies about 900 square metres of land so I don't think my wife's ashes are occupying a disproportionate amount of space.
Don't take this as criticism, just another point of view.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/04/17/603360426/how-...
> From 2012 to 2016, according to manifest records reviewed by Reuters, MedCure shipped body parts valued at a total of more than $500,000 from the United States to the Netherlands. MedCure said it helps connect donors and scientific, research and medical entities. "We are an accredited and regulated institution and adhere to the best-in-class industry standards for safety ethics, and transparency," the company said in a statement to Reuters.
Followed by:
> Freek Dikkers, the professor of ear, nose and throat medicine at the AMC whose department bought the heads, said it was stopping after learning that the company solicits donors at hospices and old age homes and that its former owners earned millions from the trade. Dikkers said that was “unacceptable.”
Something does not add up. How can you be a champion of "transparency" while your clients ignore (or pretend to ignore?) how you source the parts?
1. Isn't it obvious whether a head is old?
2. How often are old heads removed from bodies without illness?
3. Dikkers doesn't believe in free-market commerce under a low-tax regime. That's his choice, but that means he shouldn't buy anything from an American or multinational corporation.
Poor people shouldn't have to resort to selling their body.
Semantics aside, the real problem is the (desperation of) poverty, not the results of it.
I don't have too much of an opinion either way, but the Dutch are more consistent than you seem to give them credit for.
(Selling hair is legal though for all I know.)
They actually do in The Netherlands :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I suspect this is an adaptation to both increase hemoglobin transport, but also to reduce cancer risks.
In that context, anybody who works hard labor is trading in part of their health for income because many labor-intensive jobs will take their toll on the body [0]. Up to a point where people either have to switch line of work or go into early retirement, as certain parts of their body stop functioning properly and they are stuck with chronic pains for the remainder of their lives.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-work-occupational-...
The human body is amazingly reliable, no comparison to "dead" (non-self-sustaining, non-self-renuvating) machines.
I also do not find selling your hair, your blood, your saliva or urine or your sperm or what ever your body produces as selling your body.
It does not follow that there are no ethical boundaries for departing from these "products".
This argument in particular applies in both cases.
In other words, both stem from a belief in "human dignity".
There isn't really anything special about sex work, societal views on it aside. It's hard work, but for many people it causes no more harm to their dignity than anything else they could be doing.
Source: sex worker friends.
There are plenty of dangerous jobs in industries known to exploit workers. Prostitution has its problems but it’s hardly the worst.
Though the most interesting organ-based financial instruments would be rights to harvest organs post mortem, which several people in this thread seem to be overlooking.
And no matter how intellectually satisfying it would be if it were true, I don't think Western culture (or psychology in general) agrees with you that sex is just another service like computer repair. We don't have special categories of crimes for forced computer repair at gunpoint for instance. And we don't shame and fire overbearing bosses for pressuring employees into illicit computer repair.
No, but only because the European countries which prohibit compensation for tissue donations solve their shortages by importing tissue from the US.
This part of the argument does not apply to the case of selling your body after death. Making it illegal to sell one's body after death seems more logical to me then.
And has been pointed out by you and others, one can theoretically sell the rights to one's body parts after death, assuming the contract is enforced.
The 35 year old dying in a car accident probably has a lot of people depending on them that could use the money.
It could be a “free” life insurance policy.
If blood instead was paid for people would be incentivized to lie, people desperate for cash wouldn't care about the consequences. For example junkies who might have all sorts of shit in their system.
Getting enough plasma or various immunoglobulins can be the difficult part.
And sometimes you heavily depend on a few outlier cases, like this guy that’s estimated to have saved 2.4million through his 1000 donations:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Harrison_(blood_donor)
Many of the screening questions just reduce waste in the face of plenty of willing donors.
As a result, other countries with volunteer donation systems aren’t self-sufficient for plasma.
Instead they usually rely on US imports. To the point of blood products accounting for 1.3% of all US exports.
I think it's complicated. Poor people shouldn't need to "resort" to anything. We should have safety nets for people who are poor. But given that we don't have those safety nets, we should be at least a little cautious about removing mechanisms for them to help themselves, even if those mechanisms have potentially harmful elements.
I don't know what the current underground/black-market situation looks like for selling blood, but I don't take it as a given that a regulated market would be worse than what we have. I would need to see data that supported that conclusion before I jumped to it.
[0]: https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/57-milk-wanted
Poor people can sell their labor. Poor people can sell sex in the Netherlands. Why shouldn't they be able to sell other fluids?
Have you done some coke last month? Just tell and nothing will happen, except you won't be donating any blood for the next 11 months. Have you done some coke last month, but also really need money to feed your kids? It might be really tempting to lie and get that blood bank money anyway.
I would much rather rely on testing donated blood than taking someone's word for it, no matter how much money they were or weren't paid.
Do you think they can give privacy?
Government and military cannot be outsourced overseas.
A lot of countries buy arms from the US. In fact I might even hazard to guess that the US is the world's largest arms supplier. Perhaps you are right, maybe the missiles will not work if fired in the wrong direction.
Dont know anything about missiles, but jets wont work. At least not the Eurofighter for some reason.
https://www.krone.at/568118
Apparently an NSA contractor has to type in a key before every start.
>Damit die 15 Eurofighter auch wirklich starten dürfen, zahlte Österreichs Bundesheer in drei Jahren 1,5 Millionen Euro an eine private US-Sicherheitsfirma: Jetzt wurden die Kosten für jene am Fliegerhorst Zeltweg stationierten zwei "Zivilisten" bestätigt, die jedes Aufsteigen eines Jets mit einem aktuellen US-"Crypto-Schlüssel" für die Navigation und die Freund-Feind-Erkennung zulassen müssen.
>In order for the 15 Eurofighters to start, Austria's federal army paid 1.5 million euros over three years to a private US security company. Now, the costs for those two "civilians" stationed at the Zeltweg air base have been confirmed, who have to allow every start with current US-"Crypto-Keys" for navigation and friend or foe identification.
The ministry of defense denies that the two Americans from a not named US company are NSA contractors. They claim the jets would fly without but without encrypted navigation and communication. He also mentions the same situation for Sweden and Switzerland.
[1] https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/binaries/rijksoverheid/document...
https://slate.com/human-interest/2009/07/the-arrests-of-rabb...
"three New Jersey mayors, two state assemblymen and five rabbis were among more than 40 people arrested in New Jersey"
Mayor Peter J. Cammarano III of Hoboken, Mayor Dennis Elwell of Secaucus, both Democrats; Assemblyman L. Harvey Smith of Jersey City, also a Democrat; and Assemblyman Daniel M. Van Pelt, a Republican from Ocean County.
It's a strange omission as all the other resources (vivaria, lab equipment, chemicals, APIs etc are easily purchasable).
Occam's razor explanation for this would be the harvesting of a little extra profit, by defrauding the customs tax system.