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Baby Parts for Sale
Sharon BauerBeginnings, January/February 2000
Millions of dollars are being made by selling fetal body parts to scientists for research. What?! Isn't that against the law? Yes, but apparently private companies have found a loophole. In 1993 President Clinton lifted the ban on taxpayer funded fetal-tissue research. So the research itself is legal in the United States. However, the law makes it a crime for anyone to "knowingly acquire, receive, or otherwise transfer any human fetal tissue for valuable consideration" -- in other words, it is a crime to buy or sell fetal body parts.
However, because scientists depend on getting fetal body parts for their research, there is a huge demand for the "material," and private companies have stepped in to supply it.
The loophole entails simply changing some terms. The men and women who obtain the fetal parts at the abortion clinics are called "technicians." The companies that act as middlemen between the technicians and the scientists are called "harvesters." To get around the law, the harvesters (middle men) receive the fetal material as a "donation" from the abortion clinic. In return, the abortion clinic is paid a "site fee" for use of lab space at the clinic where they obtain the specimens. The harvesters then "donate" the baby parts to researchers. In return, the researchers "donate" the cost of the retrieval (rather than paying the harvesters for actual body parts) according to a formal price list. By buying and selling the unborn baby parts in this way, technically nothing is "sold," rather, everything is "donated."
The Anatomic Gift Foundation (AGF) of Laurel, Maryland, and Opening Lines of West Frankfort, Illinois, are two companies that offer this service. The Anatomic Gift Foundation performs other services besides fetal-tissue harvesting, including blood tests and adult tissue transfers. According to Brenda Bardsley, vice president of AGF, "less than 10 percent of the company's business" is from fetal-tissue retrieval. Bardsley said that adult tissue is its main business, and it handles "only about five to ten fetal-tissue procedures a week." AGF charges as much as $280 per individual body part.
Opening Lines, however, handles only fetal tissue -- more than 1,500 specimens each day and openly advertises its "services." In a brochure from Opening Lines, the group calls itself "a convenient and efficient way for researchers to receive fetal tissue without a lot of bureaucracy." It boasts that its goal is "to offer you and your staff the highest quality, most affordable and freshest tissue prepared to your specifications and delivered in the quantities you need when you need it." Opening Lines' ads sound like a menu as they state: "Our specimens vary widely in range including but not limited to those listed below: liver, spleen, pancreas, intestines, kidney, brain, lungs and heart block, spinal column and many more with appropriate discounts that apply if specimen is significantly fragmented." According to a fee schedule from the company, body parts are listed with a set fee from as little as $150 for a liver, to as much as $999 for a brain.
In most cases, scientists request not just a body part, but also list special instructions as to how the part is to be dissected, how quickly the dissection has to take place, how old the fetus is (generally less than 24 weeks), whether "abnormalities" are allowed, and how and by whom the body part will be shipped (usually by one of the well-known overnight delivery services). For instance, one scientist requested four to six "specimens" of a "whole intact leg, including the entire hip joint" from aborted fetuses 22 to 24 weeks old, and should be dissected within ten minutes of death. This kind of specific request is common and requires skill and speed for this "simple procedure" done in a side room at an abortion clinic.
Bardsley comments that nearly 75% of women who choose abortion agree to donate the fetal tissue. She says, "It's sad, but maybe it makes it [abortion] easier for us knowing that something good will come out of it. "Unfortunately, Bardsley sees this as something good, not an ethical problem! Because women who have made a decision to have an abortion now can donate their baby to research, the social, ethical and moral stigma attached to an abortion is reduced since they believe they are ultimately doing something good. Robert Orr, a physician and director of clinical ethics in California, says it is an ethical problem in that "if a woman thinks that something good is coming out of the abortion, it makes it easier for her to make the decision. It's theoretically impossible to separate the moral issue from the scientific issue."
Not only does this cause an ethical dilemma for the pregnant woman, but it also raises ethical issues for the unborn child. Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL) comments: "I deplore any medical procedure that treats human beings as chattel, as a subject fit for harvesting. The humanity of every fetus should be respected and treated with dignity and not like a laboratory animal."
Yet, more than 1.3 million abortions are legally performed every year in the United States, and tens of thousands of body parts from these aborted children are used in scientific research. The law does not give an unborn baby "human being status." Yet scientists using fetal parts for research and experimentation consider them human. How can our laws be so contradictory? We cannot pick and choose when we want unborn babies to be human. We cannot deem them human for one purpose and non-human for another. Where are the ethics in this? Where is the consistency? Some in Congress are fighting to change the laws. Perhaps one day the laws will consider an unborn child human. Perhaps the eyes and hearts of many will be opened to see the ethical problems and inconsistencies in their current practices. Perhaps...one day.
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