You’d think in a century that has seen so much inhumanity we’d have at least reached bottom by now. But apparently not.
According to a Reuters article, police in Italy have arrested a group of three women and a man. The women were apparently prostitutes who had developed a new source of income; they were having babies and selling them for their organs. The police apparently heard about this activity and set up an undercover operation in which one of the women sold her week old child for $55,000 to someone she thought was planning to use it for parts.
Reminds me of ye olde “kidney-snatchers” urban myth.
Where a hot chick comes on to a guy in a hotel bar, invites him upstairs, seduces him…and he wakes up the next day with a kidney missing? Great stuff.
No doubt this kind of shit actually does happen. In a world where people are interested in what the Dixie Chicks think about Iraq, it’s only a hop-skip-and-jump to organ snatching/harvesting.
I read it in my local paper so I can’t link to it. The article Goo linked to is essentially the same story. Obviously I can’t state for a fact that what they printed is true; but they do give specific names and dates, so it’s more than just a FOAF story.
Would the organs of a newborn child be in that much demand? Wouldn’t they be too small to be used? (I don’t mean to sound callous–I’m hoping to find reasons this story couldn’t be true.)
Newborn organs are in extreme demand. Lots of kids are born with congential abnormalities of various organs (especially hearts), which need to be fixed quickly and need comparably-sized replacements. And the sources are very rare - not many babies die the kinds of deaths that leave useful organs behind, and very few parents are willing to give up their organs. Additionally, both parents and doctors tend to be much more willing to embark on expensive organ transplants for infants/small children with entire lives ahead of them than for septagenarians who have led full lives and may well have other organ systems wearing out.