TWO EYES AND A KIDNEY TO GO PLEASE... part 1

Malcolm Muggeridge on the Sacredness of Life
This life in us, . . . however low it flickers or fiercely burns, is still a divine flame which no man dare presume to put out, be his motives never so humane and enlightened. To suppose otherwise is to countenance a death-wish. Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.         

The Leningradsky station (Ленингра́дский вокза́л) is the busiest of the eight railway stations in Moscow, Russia. Our regular SA feeding programme and frequent rail journeys caused me to pass through the station often.  The cavernous edifice is home to thousands of alcoholics and the homeless.  Petty crimes are of such frequency that the many police (Militia) roaming the area don’t bother with the routine nusaince of arresting and hauling the perpetrators to jail.  Bodily injuries are common and only the more seriously injured are provided any medical services.

Passing through the station late one evening I witnessed a small band of policemen standing over an injured man lying at the stations exit and observed the ambulance men opening the rear of their shoddy looking vehicle.  What happened next should not have surprised me as I was used to seeing dead bodies fairly regularly in Moscow. Dead persons in Moscow, in the early 1990s would often remain on the street where they died, in various stages of rigor mortis, for many hours under the watchful supervision of a policeman, waiting for an ambulance to carry the corpse to one of Moscow’s morgues.   On inspecting the injured man at the station the emergency attendants determined that the injured man was of more importance than the one already taking up room in the ambulance.  They quickly rolled out the gurney from the ambulance and dumped the already dead body on the street, loaded the injured party in its place and sped off.

With body parts selling on the internet for up to $60,000 for a kidney it’s doubtful that the above scene would be replayed today.  The market for used body parts has become a global industry and a cadaver with its lucrative body part’s offering might suddenly be more valued than a living person to the average ambulance driver or hospital emergency room attendant. Stories of the proliferation in the sale of bodies and body parts out of the back door of morgues are becoming commonplace in many countries.

In a German controversy involving autopsies, human body parts are smuggled out of hospital basements by shady hospital workers and sold to local drug companies for the extraction of growth hormones.  The list of items on drug companies' wish lists does not stop there.  In an investigative report by Der Spiegel, a liberal German newsmagazine, drug companies also buy meninges --the membranes that surround the

brain and spinal cord -- by the tens of thousands. 

In Russia bodies of the dead are automatically owned by the government and must be turned over immediately to authorities. And there are documented cases, accompanied by photographs, showing tables full of stacked nude bodies of men, women and children with long incisions showing they had been harvested for body parts.

A recent blog article on our site warned of the sudden escalation and acceptance of euthanasia and assisted suicide in Western Europe.  Russian academician warn that euthanasia in Russia will become a legal way to seize human organs; the risk of criminal seizure of human organs sharply increases, Russian Academy of Medical Sciences academician Sergey Kolesnikov (United Russia) told a REGNUM correspondent commenting on Senator Valentina Petrenko’s initiative to draft such a law… it will become one of legal ways to seize property of an individual, depending on how the procedure is stated by the law,” Kolesnikov believes. “It is no secret that there is a practice of signing contracts with elderly people on using their organs after their death. In this case it would be legal,” he said.

Like any business, it comes down to simple supply and demand.  And euthanasia seems a likely step in the supply chain for those who can afford it. The illegal sale of human body parts is big business, and an expansion in the euthanasia business will undoubtedly add to this already widespread global racket.

It's illegal in most nations, to offer or receive compensation for an organ donation, but a black market for human organs does exist. Citizens of impoverished nations or regions are often tempted to sell one of their kidneys on the black market. In some cases, these entrepreneurial donors are recruited (or learn through word-of-mouth and volunteer) and flown to another nation, where the organ is removed in a makeshift operating room.

Indian police said stolen kidneys are being sold for between $6,000 to $10,000. Many Indian doctors make less than $10,000 in a whole year so the temptation to steal organs is high.

Near New Delhi, three leading Indian transplant surgeons, the owner of the Noida Medicare Centre, a hospital famed for transplants, and six others were arrested after Shaukat Ali, a mechanic, complained he'd been drugged and robbed of a kidney during a routine medical examination. Two similar accusations had already been filed against the centre including the theft of a kidney belonging to a mentally retarded child. Police say that hundreds of poor Indians disappear every day in New Delhi alone. Human rights activists wonder how many were murdered for their organs.

According to reports by U.S. insurance companies and hospitals, the going rate for a lung is $116,400, a kidney $91,400 and a heart $57,000 – making a human body one of the most lucrative thefts around. In fact when googling for ‘body parts’, human spare part sites now outnumber those selling auto parts.

Although illegal body part sales are often linked to third world countries and those where human life holds little intrinsic value organ transplant criminal cases are slowly spreading across the United States.  A doctor in a north California Regional Medical Center was charged by Los Angeles police with giving drugs to a comatose 26-year-old man to hasten his death for a transplant team. The man didn’t die after being taken off a life support machine and police charged the doctor with hurrying his death.

To thwart body snatchers at the University of California, a major destination for organs and cadavers donated to science, they are considering inserting super-market style bar codes or radio frequency chips into corpses to make sure they are not nabbed by body snatchers.

Ann-Charlotte Marteus warned in an article in Expressen (Stockholm) that the assisted suicide industry and euthanasia support groups appear to thrive.  (reported in an earlier FSAOF blog article)

Holland has been at the forefront of active euthanasia. As the first country subsequent to Nazi Germany to legalize the practice in 2002 the initial furor was surprisingly short lived. Many in the Netherlands deemed the new rights as progressive humanism at its best. The value of euthanasia gained ever increasing popular support. “More and more people make use of their new rights.” The number of people killed increased yearly and now numbers in the thousands. We have the clear testimony of the Netherlands to back that up. In the last two decades it’s estimated that at least 100,000 deaths were the result of involuntary euthanasia.

Dutch Radio reported that the association NVVE, "Dutch Association for Voluntary Death", is now seeking funding to open a suicide clinic where not only dying, but also people with mental illnesses and early dementia, can be helped to kill themselves.

Dr. Sven Ljungholm

Former Officer

USA, Sweden, Russia, Ukraine