Benefits of Abortion

[Guest guest]

The Foetal Fund

Kimbrell, however, presumes that the foetal organ market may dwarf

the current organ transplant industry by the next century. He

writes: "The harvesting of foetal parts is essential to a new

research and transplantation industry. The new industry is based on

transplanting foetal organs and organ subparts—most

often `harvested' from elective abortions—into people, and

increasingly into a variety of other animals. Although it is deeply

controversial, the use of foetuses for research and transplantation

has caused great excitement in the biomedical community. Many

scientists and researchers have heralded foetal transplantation as

one of the most promising areas of human biotechnology. Dr Antonin

Scommenga, a prominent scientist in transplant technology, has

declared that with foetal tissue use, `We are confronted with a

biological revolution which is going to be just as important as the

nuclear revolution was for physics' ".

 

ONE LAKH= 100,000

In the US alone more than 16 lakh=1,600,000 foetuses are aborted

legally each year and in the rest of the world this figure stands at

3 crores. Foetal parts transplants are particularly effective in

curing Parkinson's disease and diabetes among others. The market for

foetal parts in USA alone is: Parkinson's disease: 10 lakh patients,

Alzheimer's disease: 30 lakh, Huntington's disease: 25,000 and

diabetics: 60 lakh. In money terms, the potential diabetes market is

estimated at $ 3 billions and the Parkinson's disease market is

valued at $ 3.5 billions.

 

Already abortion clinics which lay claim to aborted foetuses are

selling them to merchants who trade in foetal parts. This business

alone makes up for a good volume in money terms in the USA. The

undamaged extraction of the foetus provides for added advantages in

surgical purposes. This entails abortion methods which are liable to

cause greater damage to the aborting woman. As a result, the focus

is now riveted not on the health of the woman wanting an abortion

but on an extraction which is safe for the foetus. Profits of the

abortion clinics rest not so much on the fee that is charged to

aborting women, but for the price that is in turn received from the

sale of foetuses to medical and scientific institutes.

 

Kimbrell touches upon the subject of fetal tissue transplant but

regrettably fails to enlarge upon some of its potential

ramifications. I have been inveighing for many years against the use

of electively aborted fetuses for tissue and organ transplantation.

Incidentally, the spontaneously aborted fetus is to all intents and

purposes useless as a mine for tissue and organs in that it has

usually been dead for several days and if the tissues are not alive

and fresh they cannot be used; further, perhaps 65 percent of all

spontaneously aborted fetuses are chromosomally abnormal (instead of

46 chromosomes they have 69 or 92, incompatible with life) and

therefore must be discarded by the biogleaners.

 

Kimbrell correctly points out that if harvesting of the electively

aborted fetus becomes a commercial commonplace (and Bill Clinton and

his Rhodes-runners seem determined to bring this about), the

ramifications of this technology will pose a myriad of knotty

ethical questions: (a) Who is legitimately qualified to give consent

to the cannibalizing of the fetus? Certainly not the pregnant woman

who condemned her fetus to death. (b) How many additional abortions

will there be if women who are having difficulty with the abortion

decision are persuaded that the tissues and organs of the fetus will

be used to save someone else's life, e.g., a sufferer from

Parkinson's disease, or a severe uncontrollable diabetic? © The

method of abortion will be dangerously altered, to suit the fetal

tissue entrepreneurs. At present, only the pancreas of a fetus

aborted between fourteen and twenty weeks is useful in the

transplant treatment of diabetes. Mid-trimester abortions carry with

them a fifteen-fold increase in maternal mortality. A great many

women will die in this orgy of greedy profiteering. (d) The market

forces driving this technology are so powerful as to be all but

irresistible. Consider: it requires the specific brain tissue of

five fetuses aborted in the first trimester to treat a Parkinson's

victim, assuming for the moment that fetal brain tissue is truly

effective in the treatment of central nervous system disorders.

(There are, in fact, many reputable neuroscientists who assert that

the glowing reports of success with this technology reported in the

November 1992 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine from the

University of Colorado, Yale, and the University of Lund are

attributable to the "placebo" effect, i.e., that invading the brain

with a fine needle containing fetal brain cells injures the brain in

the area of the putamen and substantia nigra, and in healing itself

the brain manufactures more dopamine, the chemical substance lacking

in Parkinson's disease: once the injury is completely healed the

dopamine source is shut down and the patient reverts to the frozen

state.)

 

We now have 500,000 victims of Parkinson's disease in this country,

and 40,000 new cases are reported every year. There are four million

sufferers from Alzheimer's disease (another disorder for which fetal

brain tissue has been touted as a cure) and 250,000 new cases

annually. There are 750,000 cerebral palsy victims, two million

stroke victims, thousands of paraplegics: to treat all these

patients with fetal brain tissue transplant we will need at least 35

million fetuses aborted at 9-12 weeks. At present, there are 800,000

fetuses in the U.S. each year aborted during that period of

pregnancy. How in the world is the demand to be met? (If we factor

in RU-486, the French abortion pill, we will have perhaps half of

that 800,000 figure, since the abortion pill causes a spontaneous

abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy and the fetal tissues

are useless for transplant.) Ergo, we have a demand for 35 million

fetuses in the 9-12 week period and only 400,000 potentially useful

ones. One does not have to be an astrophysicist to understand the

attraction of recruiting Third World women by the millions to serve

as fetal farms for those who need and can afford fetal tissue

transplant therapy.

 

Who will pay for this technology? The x-rays required to guide the

needle bearing the fetal brain cells into the appropriate area in

the brain to treat the specific disorder (Parkinson's, Alzheimer's,

etc.) cost at least $5,000. Add to that the surgeon's fee, the

nursing care costs, the immense outlay of money for physical therapy

and other rehabilitative measures for these patients, and you have

an astronomical bill—on the order perhaps of $60,000 per cure. With

only one million patients being treated annually (and one can only

shudder at the immense clamor for treatment raised by the enormous

number of families of sufferers who have been denied or put on the

waiting list for the treatment) the annual national bill will be on

the order of $60 billion—10 percent of what we now spend on all of

health care today. And we are now confining ourselves only to

central nervous system disorders; we have not considered the 1.4

million diabetics who will undoubtedly seek fetal tissue treatment

for their illness or the hundreds of thousands of chemotherapy

patients who will demand fetal bone marrow transplants, to say

nothing of leukemia victims and radiation therapy survivors who also

will demand fetal bone marrow. Where will it all end?

http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9312/reviews/nathanson.html

 

Of more than 50 such requests, or "protocols," submitted by

scientists and reviewed for this article, none involved a deceased

person more than 24 weeks old - - three weeks older than a fetus who

could survive outside the womb. The "whole intact leg" protocol

described previously was requested by a scientist who needed four to

six "specimens (leg and hip joints) per shipment" from aborted

fetuses 22 to 24 weeks old. Because the request called for the

dissection to occur within 10 minutes of death, it is not difficult

to imagine the required precision and speed of the dissection

procedure occurring in a side room of an abortion clinic.

 

The men and women who perform these tasks are called " technicians"

and are employed by companies that retrieve body parts, also known

as "harvesters," such as the Anatomic Gift Foundation of Laurel,

Md., and Opening Lines, headquartered in West Frankfort, Ill. These

companies act as middlemen of sorts between the abortion clinic and

the scientist.

 

Because the sale of human tissue or body parts is prohibited by

federal law, the traffickers have worked out an arrangement to

expedite the process from which they all benefit and still remain

within current interpretations of the law. For instance, the

harvesters receive the fetal material as a " donation" from the

abortion clinic. In return, the clinic is paid a "site fee" for

rental of lab space where technicians, employed by the harvesters,

perform as many dissections as necessary to fill researcher

manifests. The harvesters then "donate" the body parts to the

researchers and, rather than pay the harvesters for the actual body

parts, "donate" the cost of the retrieval (a service) via a formal

price list.

 

The fiction is that under this mutually acceptable agreement, no

laws are broken: No body parts from aborted fetuses are sold. In

nearly all cases, the entire fetus is not needed. Rather, the fetus

is dissected and the parts shipped to either the private

corporation, university, or government agency where the research is

being conducted. Any remaining skin, tissue, bones, or organs are

ground up in the sink disposal or incinerated.

 

Brenda Bardsley, vice president of the Anatomic Gift Foundation, or

AGF, tells Insight, "It's sad, but maybe it makes it [abortion]

easier for us knowing that something good will come out of it." She

adds, "We're doing our best in an unpleasant situation." Bardsley

says the AGF's fetal-tissue retrieval accounts for "less than 10

percent of the company's business" and there are strict rules

controlling when and under what conditions a technician may perform

the procedures. "The decision to go ahead with the abortion," says

Bardsley, "must be made before the woman is approached about

donation, and we don't get access to the cadaver until the physician

has firmly established death." Nearly 75 percent of the women who

choose abortion agree to donate the fetal tissue, she says.

 

As part of AGF's services, it also runs serology (blood tests) on

women who have elected to have an abortion and requires that the

medical director of the clinic advise such women if they are shown

by the tests to have other medical conditions such as AIDS,

hepatitis B or C, or syphilis.

 

Along with its fetal-tissue harvesting, AGF also handles adult

tissue. According to Bardsley, this is their main business, and they

handle "only about five to 10 fetal-tissue procedures a week from

two different clinics." AGF charges a flat fee of as much as $280

per specimen or individual body part. According to tax records

provided to Insight by Bardsley, AGF's gross income has increased

from a little more than $180,000 in 1994 to $2 million in 1998.

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