> The students were told the removal of organs were part of autopsies required by law for prisoners. They were told that using them for teaching future physicians “benefits future patients,” and if organs weren’t used they’d be thrown away and would serve no useful purpose.
The (very reasonable) question being whether it’s appropriate for the warden rather than the family to authorize the donation, when family is in the picture.
The title seems to willfully invoke the far more sinister “organ-harvesting” trope that’s alarmingly a live issue in other carceral systems to this day [0], but that’s not what the article’s actual allegations describe.
[0] e.g. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2021/06/china-un-hum...
No place on earth is more annoyingly finicky about headlines than HN.
Black market organ harvesting of live prisoners didn't even cross my mind when reading this headline. What makes you think they are willfully invoking that trope? The use of "vanish"?
Could you illustrate a better, but still concise, title?
Quite a few people hold conspiratorial opinions of organ transplantation, like that doctors won't work as hard to save people flagged as donors. https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/consumer-health...
That said, this is a topic from which much tears and ink have spilled forth into the world. On one hand, a good candidate for harvesting can give many lives. On the other, what is death anyways? According to what criteria? You are very much alive in order to donate. Brain death you say? How do we measure a consciousness? Do we even know what it is? When does the “soul” leave and a person becomes a nonbeing?
In hospitals I’ve been at a nurse can declare you dead if there are two nurses and they listen to your heart for a minute.
I think organ donation is a great good. I don’t think it should be a decision taken lightly or, worse yet, taken in order to stave off any appearances of appearing conspiratorial.
2018: https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5250
2019: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/17/china-is-harve...
The speculative part is where people start making organs the main point of the whole thing, it has a great ick factor if you're doing nationalist flamewars.
There are numbers on how many people get executed there: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_China#...
It seems unlikely that the person making prosecution and judgment decisions is also in a position to personally acquire and sell the person's organs but hey what do I know.
I don't think they stopped, just got smarter about it, if done organized en masse the amount of money is insane for people who don't earn so in their entire lives. Nobody sane will brag how they got new kidney from shady chinese guys when this was well known.
Western governments attack enemy regimes by funding religious cults (with associated militias) like MEK and Falun Gong (which are allowed to have multiple OTA TV channels while the Chinese government are banned from most of the internet.) They also fund fundamentalist Islam in northern Africa, and neo-Nazis in central Asia and eastern Europe.
It's important to dismiss "strong suspicions" from semi-anonymous sources and ask for actual evidence, circumstantial or not. Propaganda is supposed to be what we dislike about China. We shouldn't help spread innuendo if that's actually a value we have.
I see plenty of evidence, though no "smoking gun," mentioned on Wiki, including "transcripts of telephone interviews in which hospitals told prospective transplant recipients that they could obtain Falun Gong organs" [1].
> A good way to do that is to cite the conclusions of an "independent tribunal" that no one had heard of, whose only concerns are spreading the consensus about the evils of China and the Chinese, and who are mysteriously funded.
This seems inaccurate considering the statements from from Amnesty International, the U.N. Human Rights Council, etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilgour%E2%80%93Matas_report#R...
It's not that crazy: https://www.westernmassnews.com/2023/05/11/getting-answers-b...
The idea being to preserve the substance of the concern—that families are being deprived of their legitimate say in the autopsy—without suggesting it’s more than it is.
“Prisoners’ organs vanish” suggests mystery, insinuates conspiracy, and suggests that the prisoners may be alive—none of which is borne out by the substance of the article.
Prisons exist to control people’s bodies, and I suspect this might be part of why, decade after decade, lurid allegations pop up about prisons (and hospitals, and orphanages, and asylums) violating prisoner’s bodily integrity while they’re institutionalized. Whether or not you put stock in the allegations, media outlets have for decades kept the story of “organ harvesting” from prisoners for transplant and for profit (and for the Bodies exhibition) circulating in the public imagination (e.g. [0], [1], [2])
The article’s allegations are about an ethical problem, but a subtle one to do with consent and postmortem bodily integrity—nobody’s suggesting that Alabama is doing anything macabre to prisoners’ bodies beyond what routinely happens in autopsies. This is a “we should fix this policy default” problem, not a “body snatcher vanishes organs” problem.
[0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/41639005 [1] https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/unfounded-claims-organ-ha... [2] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2021/06/china-un-hum...
>“Prisoners’ organs vanish” suggests mystery, insinuates conspiracy, and suggests that the prisoners may be alive
I have no idea how the word vanish implies the prisoners were still alive. I'm baffled and that a few people have said the same.
>nobody’s suggesting that Alabama is doing anything macabre to prisoners’ bodies beyond what routinely happens in autopsies.
Indeed! And I don't believe the title implies otherwise. Unless the word "vanish" has evolved to somehow imply harvesting of live organs since I last read the definition.
Admittedly, enough people are saying it that I'm starting to think I'm the weird one for not assuming the word vanish implies harvesting organs out of live prisoners.
That's exactly what I thought this was about until halfway through the article - for-profit prisons expanding in another direction
What's the functional difference between the two to the bereaved? I don't think finding out they waited until after the autopsy to steal the organs is comforting.
I would feel much better about the harvested organs of a loved one being transplanted to save a life vs being placed on a jar for medical students, I suspect most voluntary donors prefer their organs be used for transplants rather than medical training. So to me, what Alabama is doing is fat more sinister.
Biological waste that was going to be disposed of isn’t as scary.
Why is this excuse fine for one practice and not the other?
Was this unethical? Yes. Is it the darkly hinted about conspiracy to procure black-market organs some will read into the headline? No.
"Alabama prisoners' organs vanish, and there's a whole lot of passing the buck" could easily be "Deceased prisoners' organs taken by University of Alabama against families wishes" but that's not going to get the clicks.
And that is less worse because..?
"According to the lawsuit, UAB Division of Autopsy publications from 2006 to 2015 show that 23% of their yearly income comes from Department of Corrections autopsies"
https://www.al.com/news/2024/04/uab-stealing-dead-alabama-pr....
> All people who die in custody have an autopsy, multiple prison officials testified in a federal court hearing earlier this year.
Autopsy pricing isn’t hard to find. https://www.etsu.edu/com/pathology/forensic-center/documents... says $4k; https://www.hamiltoncounty.in.gov/Faq.aspx?QID=302 says $2.5-5k.