Body blow: trading at odds with dignity
Gareth Jones looks at the way in which bodies and body parts are sold in the United States, and asks some searching questions.
IT is well known that people can donate their bodies to medical schools to be used by medical and other biomedical science students to assist in their study of anatomy and the human body. This is an eminently worthwhile endeavour for which anatomy educators and researchers are deeply grateful. This is also an outworking of the important ethical principle of altruism — a disinterested and selfless concern for the wellbeing of others.
But what would you feel if you knew that your donated body or parts of your body were subsequently going to be sold to others for profit?
This is what has been happening over the last two decades in the United States, with the emergence of private willedbody donation companies or body brokers.
These private companies are based on a forprofit business model. They promote their services through advertising in funeral homes, hospices, nursing facilities and newspapers.
Since these companies generally offer to cover the entire funeral and/or cremation costs for the family, unlike medical schools in the United States, they tend to attract a large number of impoverished donors.
Once the body brokers accept the bodies, they are dismembered and shipped to national and international clients for research or education purposes, often in postgraduate education courses. Since there is little regulatory or ethical guidance regarding how these companies operate, there are numerous transgressions of medical ethics.
Over the past 1218 months a series of investigative reports by journalists from Reuters has appeared and has thrown the spotlight on many of the activities taking place.
The sales pitch of these commercial organisations is based on altruism — the gift of the body will benefit medical science and others in need; but it is also financial — body donations save a family money.
The reality is that a large supply of free bodies is central to the business model, since these organisations pay virtually nothing for them and sell whole bodies for up to $US6000 ($NZ8500).
Body parts cost less and are used, mainly but not exclusively, for surgical seminars.
Transactions like this are very common and demonstrate the ease with which human body parts can be bought and sold in the United States. Neither the sales nor the shipments violate any laws, since it is perfectly legal in most states to sell body parts that were donated for research or education (but not for transplantation).
One of these organisations sells or leases about 10,000 body parts from American donors annually, shipping about 20% of them overseas to as many as 45 countries.
Unfortunately, there have been a number of instances where body parts have been infected with HIV and hepatitis.
Of what relevance is all this to those of us living in New Zealand, since these activities are far removed from what could possibly happen in this country? Everything here is controlled by the Human Tissue Act
2008, which specifies that there are to be no financial considerations in the collection and use of human tissue.
They remind us of fundamental ethical considerations in how we view and treat the bodies of the dead. The vast majority of people have deep moral intuitions that lead them to bestow value on other human beings like themselves.
We closely identify people with their bodies, so that what is done to a dead body has relevance for our feelings about that person when alive: it is not possible to totally separate the dead body and the once living person.
A deceased person also has relatives and friends who are now grieving the death. Hence, respect for the dead body is respect for their grief. We show disrespect to a person now dead when we allow that person’s body to be used in the absence of any consent on the person’s part prior to death, plus consent of close relatives.
The human body or its parts should not become a commodity to be traded as we trade fridges, cars or houses. Rejection of commercialisation of the body is based on belief in the dignity of the human body after death. Trading in bodies and body parts jeopardises this. This is made worse when they are used in completely different social and cultural contexts in other countries, since this breaks the network of relationships between the donor, their family and the body.
Commercialisation, commodification and profit generation are never compatible with the highest ethical standards of care for those who contribute their most precious gift for the advancement of medical education and research.
❛ We closely identify people with their bodies, so that what is done to a dead body has relevance for our feelings about that person when alive: it is not possible to totally separate the dead body and the once living
person