Body Fluids and Life forms as “Raw Materials” for Industrial Production
In The Netherlands, an organisation called “Moeders voor Moeders” (mothers for mothers), whose folders can be found in all pharmacies, calls upon young pregnant women to help their less fortunate sisters, who have difficulty conceiving naturally. It collects the urine of young pregnant women for ten weeks between the sixth and sixteenth week of pregnancy. This urine contains hCG—a hormone which earlier could not be made synthetically. The Dutch multinational AKZO-Pharma makes fertility hormones and hCG pregnancy-test kits from this urine (Gupta 2000).It is clear that women give away free a natural resource that is at the basis of a product through which AKZO makes huge profits.
The question is: To what extent do bodily substances, tissues, secretions and organs, still belong to the body, thus resorting under a person’s bodily self-determination, and when do they start becoming property capable of being transferred to new owners, like hospitals?
A placenta apparently belongs to the hospital, not to the mother and child who cooperated in creating it. Placentas are collected and delivered/sold to IVF embryology labs. In the 1990s there was a controversy regarding the sale of placenta by hospitals in England to Merieux, a cosmetics manufacturer. In China women were recruited to donate foetuses. Brain cells extracted from foetuses were being used to make a preparation to treat Parkinson’s disease, in the belief that stem cells of embryos are able to develop in the brains of adults into dopamine producing cells, whereby Parkinson’s disease can be slowed down. People were willing to pay up to US $10,000 for such a concoction.
An application was submitted to obtain a patent for the characterisation of the gene sequence coding for human relaxin, a hormone which is synthesised and stored in female ovaries and helps in dilation, thus facilitating the birth process. A substance that naturally occurs in women’s bodies was thus being treated as an ‘invention’ of three male scientists, Peter John Hud, Hugh David Nill, and Geoffrey William Tregear (Shiva 1994). There are reports of theft of ova from Croatian and Iranian clinics sold to research laboratories, and trade in eggs of Rumanian women to clients in Israel, the UK and the USA (de Volkskrant 2005). Women in developing countries of the global South or in the underdeveloped East European countries are more vulnerable to commercialisation of body materials, and even if provided compensation, they are likely to be paid much less than women in the developed North and West. The Internet has contributed immensely to the transnational trade in body parts."
