The human body parts business is booming with over $500 million in sales every year, and the market is soon expected to hit over a billion. Using body parts stored in “tissue banks” American businesses make hundreds of millions of dollars selling products crafted from donated human bodies, even though it is illegal to profit from cadaver parts, an Orange County Register investigation found. The donors are never informed or compensated.
The birth of a baby to a 14-year-old alleged rape victim in Mexico has feminist groups outraged. While the family of the girl attempted to have her abort the baby, social workers, religious, doctors and state officials successfully urged the girl to allow her child to live. Source: Washington Post
On April 7, the Judiciary Committee of the Swiss Senate (Conseil des Etats) approved a bill providing for abortion on demand in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy. The bill will go to the Senate floor in June. A similar bill was adopted by the National Council (House of Representatives) in Autumn 1998. (Swiss Union for Decriminalizing Abortion, April 12 2000, in IPPF News)
The Times reported last month that an investigation has discovered that some 63,000 Swedish citizens, 95 per cent of them women, were sterilized between 1935 and 1975. The Swedish sterilization law of the 1930s was modeled on Hitler’s in Germany. The programme had cross-party support and local authorities, doctors and school administrators all worked to the same principle that “misfits” had to be sterilized for the health of the nation and their own protection. The commission found that at least 6,000 women were sterilized using direct physical force and a further 25,000 were treated using “force-like” measures. Thousands more women were unaware that they were being sterilized. The rest “accepted” their fate.