DUBLIN, Feb 24 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Organ transplant operations, many still fraught with uncertainty over ethics around brain death, are so popular that huge waiting lists, organ purchasing, and illegal organ harvesting have become commonplace. The frenzy has caused governments the world over to aggressively promote organ donation and has even led to serious allegations of forced organ donation.
The burgeoning black market trade in organs was highlighted recently by the Chinese sale of the organs of prisoners. Recent revelations in Ireland and England show that often without parental consent, hospitals have harvested organs from children who have died in hospital.
This month the Irish government is investigating at least two hospitals in Ireland for allegedly harvesting organs from children without parental consent and giving the organs (pituitary glands) to pharmaceutical companies. Irish news has reported that the pharmaceutical company Pharmacia & Upjohn has confirmed that it had removed glands from dead children and adults in Irish hospitals for 11 years, until 1985. A parents’ group is calling for the investigation to be widened to include all hospitals. The group says it has received over 2,000 complaints about the removal of organs from children and adults during post-mortem examinations, without the permission of next of kin.
Professor John Harris, an international authority on bioethics from Manchester University and a former member of the British Medical Association ethics committee suggested bodies of the dead should become public property so they can be used to harvest organs. He also called for laws to allow people to sell live organs. This appears to be just one more of many disturbing developments, such as the now exposed common selling of aborted baby body parts and creation of live embryos for experimentation, that have resulted from the legalization of abortion a few decades ago. The abortion mentality views a human body and its parts as a commodity, possession or public policy item to be disposed of or exploited at someone’s will.
Read the stories in the Irish Times here and here.
See the BBC report on Dr. Harris.
See related LifeSite stories here, here and here.
(with files from Pro-Life E-News)