Opinion: In the market for a skin graft?
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Reason magazine’s Kerry Howley wrote yesterday about how private companies make big money processing and selling human tissue for certain types of organ transplants. To one reader, Howley didn’t go far enough. I’ll let the full, unedited letter speak for itself:
Kerry Howley’s opinion page comments ‘Big business in body parts’ focuses on body tissues harvested from cadavers, but an equally gruesome harvest from live bodies has been in progress for years. Doctors and hospitals needlessly mutilate the genitals of newborn infant boys, charging the parents and the insurance company for the privilege. But even before the screaming, vomiting child has been carried back to his clueless parents, his amputated foreskin has been whisked away to safety, as a welcome addition to the hospital’s growing For Sale collection. Foreskins are big business. Pharmaceutical and cosmetic firms purchase them for testing new products, and at least one cosmetic firm adds ground foreskins to their face cream for pampered women. Other firms transform the foreskin into transplant tissue. So, which is worse. Harvesting tissue from dead bodies, or from children who can only object by screaming in pain? Rood AndersonPhoenix
Um, enlightening ... painfully.