Halloween is the holiday of fun with death. Once a year we romp with ghosts and goblins and wander through haunted houses where skeletons dance in scary entertainment. Once a year we give free rein to the fear of death.
On every other day of the year we treat death with the dignity it deserves. Funeral customs express reverence for the body that once housed a soul; burial traditions show respect for the corpse that once had been animated by the spirit of a unique life.
But respect was entirely missing from the way Harold Dillard’s body was handled when he donated it to science.
Dillard was only 56 years old when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2009. He decided to make the last selfless act of his life donating his body to science, research and medical training through an intermediary called Bio Care. The following year his daughter learned that her father’s head was among body parts discovered at a medical incinerator. She also learned — for the first time, she told Reuters who interviewed her for their series, “The Body Trade” — that Bio Care was in the business of selling body parts.
Shocked and upset, she told Reuters, “We would have never have signed up if they had ever said anything about selling body parts — no way. That’s not what my dad wanted at all.”
American law forbids profit from the sale of organs used for transplants or body parts used to repair the injured. Those practices are strictly regulated by the U.S. government. But there is no regulation whatsoever of “body brokers” who are in the business of taking bodies donated to science and selling them — or parts of them — for profit. In this business, human remains are nothing but product. It is a free-for-all body market. Almost anyone, regardless of expertise, can dissect and sell human body parts.
“What they are doing is profiting from the sale of humans,” Angela McArthur, who directs the body donation program at the University of Minnesota Medical School, said of the unsavory and unregulated world of body brokers.
Where there are no laws, regulations or oversight, there is lots of room for abuse. Reuters’ investigation found instances in which bodies were used without donor or next-of-kin consent, donors were misled about how bodies would be used, bodies were dismembered by chainsaws instead of medical instruments, and body parts were discarded in medical waste or stored in such unsanitary conditions that they decomposed. It is a repugnant picture.
Because donated bodies play a necessary and essential role in medical education and research, bodies are much in demand. Society needs medicine and science, and medicine and science needs bodies. People who donate their bodies to science are providing a benefit to all of us. The least we can do in return is treat their gift respectfully.
Halloween playfulness with death may be fun, but a business that desecrates the dead is disgraceful. It is time to stop the practice of treating human remains as product for profit.
Back in the 19th century there were grave robbers, shady people working in the dark who desecrated the dead to obtain cadavers. Now, two centuries later, it is high time to put a stop to those practices.
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