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Exclusive: Federal agents found fetuses in body broker's warehouse (Warning: Graphic images)
Federal agents discovered four preserved fetuses in the Detroit warehouse of a man who sold human body parts, confidential photographs reviewed by Reuters show. The fetuses were found during a December 2013 raid of businessman Arthur Rathburn's warehouse. The fetuses, which appear to have been in their second trimester, were submerged in a liquid that included human brain tissue. Rathburn, a former body broker, is accused of defrauding customers by sending them diseased body parts. He has pleaded not guilty and his trial is set for January.
How Rathburn acquired the fetuses and what he intended to do with them is unclear. Rathburn's lawyers did not respond to requests for comment, and neither the indictment nor other documents made public in his case mention the fetuses.
"This needs to be reviewed," said U.S. Representative Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee who recently chaired a special U.S. House committee on the use of fetal tissue. Blackburn recoiled when a Reuters reporter showed her some of the photographs, taken by government officials involved in the raid.
Reuters: The Body Trade
(Score: 5, Informative) by urza9814 on Thursday December 28 2017, @08:08PM (2 children)
And what evidence do you have of that?
The guy is legally selling parts of human corpses that were donated to science/medicine. Seems reasonable that occasionally they might get a corpse that contains a fetus. He can't legally sell those, so...he ought to be destroying them probably, but having one or two still in storage doesn't even seem particularly strange given the circumstances. Definitely sounds like he may be violating some regulations involving proper storage/handling of human remains (assuming such regulations exist...sounds like they're pretty lax), but I see no direct evidence of any other crimes here.
But this is what to expect when you do *anything* on an industrial scale. Companies will cut any corners they can to save money, and if there's little regulation or it isn't sufficiently enforced, they won't stop at just finding loopholes, they're going to break the laws outright. Maybe it doesn't need much regulation -- they're corpses after all, so who really cares how they're treated? But it might screw up your experiments or transplant, so probably it should be regulated from that side at least. And maybe from OSHA to ensure the corpses aren't spreading diseases to the employees...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 28 2017, @09:10PM
re: lax enforcement: the "authorities" don't enforce anything that has to do with actual violation of rights. they're too busy getting in on the action for that.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 28 2017, @09:24PM
...and the fetuses are intact.
If they were the result of a surgical abortion, they'd be in pieces.
What occurred to me first is miscarriage (underdeveloped and stillborn).
N.B. Miscarriage is generally accepted as being the woman's body recognizing that the fetus is not viable and expelling it.
Now, that still leaves the possibility of the woman (by choice or by chance) ingesting a substance that induced a spontaneous abortion.
Outside of the places where the (male) Uterus Nazis have gotten their way, that's still a legal choice.
...and to our very own Uterus Nazis:
"If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament." --Florynce Kennedy
(Often erroneously attributed to Gloria Steinem)
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]