In the rush to harvest body parts, death investigations have been upended
latimes.com
latimes.com
I don't know how helpful this will be - for example, there's an option to restrict donations to only non-profits, but OneLegacy (from the story) is one of the four nonprofits in CA that procure organs and runs the registry.
There's also limitations per organ/tissue option, and for research. Also for "life-saving and reconstructive purposes" only.
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/about/donatelife/do...
Good work! This is important information and I hope it stays at the top of the comments. I'll be looking for a FL version.
Edit note: With privacy and security in mind, I'm not 100% sure how comfortable I am with enrollment and modification ability thereof occurring directly through the internet.
This is really frustrating to me, even as my dad is on a transplant waiting list. The Donate Life page does give me an idea though: I can specify directed donations through an advance healthcare directive. I'm pretty tempted to leave my kidneys to my father and then find a way to explicitly donate my body to an organization that won't leave me with as many questions as these organ procurement nonprofits do.
The chart in the article with prices of body parts only lists tissues - probably because it is illegal in the US to buy/sell organs; organs go to a match through the central first-come-first-serve registry. It does mention instances of organs also being harvested and the negative externalities of that, but at least those organs had a large effect on someone else's life. The same often can't be said about tissues.
I have taken myself off of the state's 'organ donor' list, which is actually for both organs and tissues. IL also seems to have a harvesting racket like CA; there are two harvesting ('procurement') organizations that have computerized access to morgues and coroners. I'm going to find a way to specify that I only want organs to be donated, and perhaps tissues but only to an organization that I trust.
The valves are broken out separately from the heart for purposes of donation, and the story also discusses a case of valve harvesting causing a problem.
I'm struggling to figure out where to draw the line until I can update my advance healthcare directive... all these tissues, as you say, can still be valuable. I mostly just hate the lack of transparency in these relationships, and that these organizations seem to be hiding this tissue use behind the actual process of organ donations...
What if a celebrity had an organ donor citation on their drivers license. Do they still exempt them?
I might remove my organ donation status after reading this. It is a distortion of what I assumed occurred.
It would have been helpful to list the states where this is allowed. "California and many other states" is not very informative.
Harvesting body parts for profit is obscene.
When I saw that one, it became clear the companies involved in this know they are operating on shaky ground.
There is a perfectly valid concern of rich/eccentric/stalky people paying a lot of money to be fitted with bodyparts of their idol. I get that.
But even then the primary motivator can only be pre-emptive avoidance of PR backlash. Harvesting cadavers for big profits feels creepy enough. But just imagine the media storm if a celebrity's family goes on national TV, complaining how their plans for open-coffin funeral were ruined because the national treasure's body had been taken apart and sold for very high-value scrap. Possibly (and quite literally) even before the corpse had got cold.
Optics are important. Checks the price of cornea.
I must say, that the utilitarian views on corpse harvesting are to me, appalling. The thought of someone I cared profoundly for, having their form indifferently, irreverently butchered for anything other than pure, noble science or directly life-critical purposes is wretched, and even then... It appears that an argument is being made that such procedures benefit some, who even if able to survive without, are entitled and that it fills a market niche and therefore it's perfectly fine. If a case can be made for justifying cosmetic harvesting beyond the will of the departed, it doesn't seem drastically more extreme to propose an industry for necrophilia or necro-voyeurism or any other taboo having only ideological consequences. The same reasoning could be applied, with arguments both for and against being mostly of subjective values. I'd rather not.
I hope those who view existence and its every detail from macro to micro exclusively through the lens of cold science and economy can pause to consider either that some others don't, or find a suitable formulaic substitute for empathy. Assuming ownership and control of someone's (formerly) most intimate personal property, ie body, might not be as agreeable as you think.
1. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-nov-02-mn-49420...
We may not be as different from China as we prefer to think. Rather than state sanctioned, ours will be corporately so. Social credit system is coming here soon too.
1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cash-connections-can-get-a-kidn...
I do want my family to get a big cut of that if it's selling for a grand per teaspoon.
It goes deeper, too, with bodily tissue not being recognized as property for some reason. This makes it hard to sue doctors and hospitals for misusing your medical waste, etc.
It would be nice if you could even select what you want to donate and sell, such as sell your skin and donate your organs.
Because it's your body, not your families body. A law allowing the family to do this against your wishes will never pass.
You also not allowed to sell your own body.
A dead person can't own property, which is why wills, trusts, and laws of intestate succession exist.
Depending on who is paying the bills, it may not be very profitable, if at all, to provide services. Especially after cost of money considerations are factored in due to how long it can take to actually receive payment.
I'd think it'd be similar to the current situation where the (eventually dead) person has to opt-in. It can also be put in the will so that family members aren't aware of it and kill you for profit.
Why are medical examiners the ones making these decisions?
Disgusting.
There's a big difference in giving up some body parts to save someone's life once you don't need them and getting sent to the glue factory to feed someone's vanity.
If we just ground up your loved ones on death and turned them into fertilizer or corn feed for cows you might have a very dim view about life.
Funerals aren’t for the dead, they are for the living.
What is the flow of reasoning here? What does “dim view about life” mean?
Is it a prion risk or other health concern? or just people being squeamish / worried about misuse e.g. "haha that apple you just ate was made out of my grandpa" type thing.
I bet there are already cases like this, either in the US, or in the dystopia that is China.
Fuck, I mean, there's already people out there who drug people and harvest their kidneys in a bathtub of some dirty motel somewhere. If there are people doing this shit on the black market, then there's definitely sociopaths that would do this shit in the hospitals if they thought they could get away with it, which is just what the organ donor checkbox opens the door to.
Organ-carving doctors are desensitized to death. They don't care if you live or die, but they do care if they get to harvest your organs because those are worth a ton of money. I'm sure there's 100's if not 1000's of people getting carved up every year that could have been saved, but the incentives are to let the person die to harvest their organs.
1: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/patient-wakes-doctors-remove-o...
Besides, a small portion of those procedures are for valid purposes. Accidents, birth defects, and so forth.
Also, I'm pretty sure it confused costs with prices. You may pay $x for medical grade skin prepped for the operating theatre. It doesn't mean the same skin still attached to a dead body is worth $x. It's like going to a restaurant and trying to pay for 1% of a cow's market value. You want to pay that money, better be ready to kill, cut and cook a cow.
This does not seem the same. It seems like companies are running around sending people to harvest as much tissue as fast as possible because they make tons of money. Note that the picture in the article only lists prices of skin, cornea, tendons, etc. That is probably because it is against US law to buy/sell actual organs like a heart or a kidney. But these companies are clearly making a profit on everything else if they're so obsessed with getting all the tissues they can, even at the cost of murder investigations.
The Red Cross marketing team calls me to get me to try to sign up for more blood donations. But they don't lobby the government for laws that hook them into the coroners and morgues so they can harvest all the blood the second that someone dies.
Would you prefer to instead called it a terrifyingly rational view?
The idea that access to life-saving treatment is based on ability to pay, and that there are corporations making profit at the expense of people's health and well-being is pretty terrifying to me. There's nothing rational about such a system.
That is why poor people in poorer countries than the U.K. don’t have access to life saving treatments. I’m sure even poor people in the U.K. don’t have access to the same care that rich people do.
Only under capitalism. That's precisely why this is terrifyingly capitalistic. Societies ability to produce dictates all aspects of life. But not necessarily ability to pay.
> I’m sure even poor people in the U.K. don’t have access to the same care that rich people do
Not if you're really rich (a millionaire). But even rich people in the UK will usually go for the NHS first. The care's pretty good.
I’d prefer it just be dictated by pay and skip the bullshit.
But AFAIK on some countries of EU and Brazil, receiving organs is either free or inexpensive.
No, because the body was never theirs, no one can steal it or it's value from them. You might choose to give it to them (including by leaving the matte to the default inheritance rules of your jurisdiction), you might choose to give it someone else, but until you do and it is transferred according to that decisions, it's no one’s but yours.
We aren't property of other people, whether of the same, past, or subsequent generations.
I'm wondering how they would handle the bodies of those who have signed up for cryonics... Is there even a way to notify these companies that someone has signed up for that?