Jophiel wrote:
The fetal tissue is donated by consent of the mother. PP is allowed to recoup the cost of extracting and preserving the tissue, hence the $30 to $100 fee being charged. This is not "selling".
At what dollar value does it become "selling"? The very idea of charging a service fee for the cost associated with "donating" something is problematic, at best (and yes, I'm aware that the legal loopholes already exist, I'm just pointing them out). When I donate clothes to Goodwill, I don't get to charge them a fee for sorting through my old clothes and transporting the ones I want to donate. Right? I'm not aware of any form of "donation" in which you negotiate a fee to the person/business/whatever you're donating to for some cost associated with said donation *except* the one that I suspect most of us find the most ghoulish and legally problematic (donating human tissues and organs).
Isn't that the least bit odd? Maybe it should fire off some alarm bells? Again, this is not limited to just aborted fetuses, but that's the issue we're looking at right here (and the one most problematic, because it's the one source that has the most potential to be abused). Barring committing murder (which is, you know, illegal), you can't control when someone's tissues or organs become available for donation. But, as you're well aware, abortion is legal. Ergo, you can control when fetal tissue becomes available, and how much. You can even influence the market in ways that you can't influence for normal adult body parts.
That makes this really problematic. Look. If PP wants to donate the left over bits from abortions, that's fine (well, sorta. see below). But then they should donate them, at their own expense. That's what donating things usually entails. I'll also point out that this is still problematic for an organization that receives public money that goes into the same pot that they use for their abortion operations. It's impossible to separate that, and can still become problematic. A bit of clever accounting and they can "cover" the cost for "donating" the parts with funding coming for other parts of their operation. Yes, I know this is part of an argument we've had several times before, but it's just one more reason in a long list of reasons why their abortion operation should be kept completely and financially separate (as in separate businesses, not just separate columns in an accounting ledger).
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Hence the "cash monies" comment -- fifty bucks for the tissue preservation frankly seems ridiculously cheap.
$50 for one liver. $90 for a brain. $30 for a pancreas. $45 for bone marrow. Etc, etc, etc. I believe they were talking about prices for each individual part of a fetus. And when you have rooms full of bags with fetus parts in them, that can amount to pretty huge amounts of money per year.
The other problem (which I don't believe has been mentioned here yet), is that the doctor in question was recorded actually talking about making decisions about how to perform an abortion with an eye towards preserving the most valuable (I don't think she actually said "profitable", so there's that) parts. Um... Which is also completely illegal. Explicitly so for the specific case of abortions. An abortion is supposed to be performed in a manner most safe to the woman having the procedure. Any viable parts left over may be donated, but no consideration to donation can be made when deciding how to perform the procedure itself. Right there, she's on record admitting to violation of the law. Even if we play games with what constitutes a "service charge" or "selling body parts", that bit can't be explained away.
It also strongly suggests a specific motivation to preserve those parts. Which I suppose we could imagine is based on an altruistic desire to advance the state of medical science by providing these much needed parts *or* out of a desire to generate a bit of additional revenue stream out of their abortion operations. The fact that they're charging a service fee to donate the parts kinda rules out the altruism explanation IMO. My money is on money.
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I also have to laugh that we're already at "this means you're in favor of getting pregnant to have fetal tissue abortions!" I guess the insanity had to go somewhere now that "you must be in favor of incestuous polygamy" arguments dried up.
I didn't say you must be in favor of it. I just said that it's no more illegal to pay a woman to get pregnant and then provide her an abortion later so as to harvest parts for stem cells or direct tissues or whatever than it is to harvest those things right now. If you're defending the actual illegal part (charging money to provide parts from aborted fetuses), then it's hard to imagine that you'd oppose the part that's already legal (surrogates being compensated isn't illegal I don't believe). The details of shuffling money around to manage this are no less difficult than shuffling the money around to negotiate a "service fee" to provide parts to a buyer today. Right?
I'm just pointing out that you're basically defending every component of that slippery slope. So it's legal to pay a woman to get pregnant. It's legal for that woman to choose to have an abortion (presumably if the person who paid her agrees, which would obviously be the case here). It's legal for the parts of the aborted fetus to be donated. And it's legal for the operate performing the abortion to charge a fee to the agency obtaining it. And you don't see a potential problem here?
Even if it's not PP doing the paying, what's to stop the biotech company they're contracted with from doing so, well outside the sight of most people? While I have issues with PP, my focus isn't about opposing PP. It's about making sure that our laws actually make sense and prevent abuses. And here, I see a huge potential for abuse. Ignoring that possibility out of a knee jerk need to defend PP and the rights of women to abortion just seems incredibly myopic. It's not really about PP. It's about not opening up the kind of horrific legal loopholes that I'm seeing being opened up. I said the same sort of thing in the numerous discussions we had about ESC research. Same deal. It's not about just what this one group in front of us is doing today, but what we're making possible for someone else to do tomorrow by blindly taking a position on the issue of today.
Is it so much to ask that we look down the road ahead of us and maybe make some effort to avoid the potholes? I don't think so.