Miracle beauty treatments fuel trade in aborted babies
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By: Father Shay Cullen
The director of the PREDA Foundation social services unit for sexually abused children, homeless youth and abused women in Olongapo, The Philippines, Father Shay Cullen, said in a May 19 statement that a long history of general disrespect for the dignity of life and the marketing of young children to The Philippines' sex-tourist industry is leading abuses to new depths of depravity and humiliating commercialisation of human life.
In response to a report in the English, The Observer newspaper of April 17, detailing a flourishing smuggling trade in live foetuses that are cryogenically frozen and sold to clinics offering "youth injections" that claim "to rejuvenate the skin and cure a raft of other diseases," Father Cullen points to the inhumanity of the notorious sex business and girlie bars around The Philippines as a breeding ground for hardening attitudes that allow new and increasingly shameful exploitation of human life.
He cited the case of Maria (not her real name), a 16-year-old girl, who called the PREDA Foundation from her mobile phone recently. She was asking for refuge and he said her voice reflected her traumatised state and that of a person "on the edge of despair." Father Cullen said he and social workers from their home took their van in the middle of the night to the agreed rendezvous point. "She was hiding in the shadows," he said "but when she recognised our van she came running and climbed aboard to safety."
Maria told the social workers that her mother had sold her to a sex club and she got pregnant from a foreign, sex tourist. The mamasan (boss of the bar) then forced her to have an abortion, which left her in shock, traumatised and desperate. Father Cullen says that both Maria and the foetus of the baby are the victims in this case.
In his April 17 article in The Observer, Tom Parfitt exposes a new way in which foetuses have become the victims of an illicit vanity industry in the Ukraine and Russia. He claims that women in the former Soviet republic are being paid up to £100 ($1,450) to persuade them to have abortions and allow the foetuses to be used as an ingredient for treatment. He says they can be sold in Russia for up to £5,000 ($72,000) and that some women are paid extra as an enticement to have their abortions late in pregnancy, even though this is a restricted practice in the Ukraine. Older foetuses are believed to have greater curative powers, hence attracting a higher price and doctors use a special abortion procedure that also extracts the placenta.
Parfitt claims that a loophole in Ukraine law that allows aborted human foetuses to be passed onto research institutes if the mother consents and her anonymity is protected, is being exploited by staff at the state institutes, who on sell them to private clinics for use in the beauty industry. Many are then smuggled into Russia where higher prices are available. He cites the case of a courier who was arrested at the Russian border carrying 25 frozen embryos in two vacuum flasks.
Parfitt quotes a senior officer from the Ukraine police as saying, "It is extremely difficult to detect this because there are corrupt agreements between respected doctors and academics."
Parfitt goes on to describe the flourishing Russian beauty treatment known as "foetal therapy", which, despite a ban by the government on use of all human cells other than bone marrow, offers injections of stem cells, the undivided cells present in embryos that are claimed to adapt into any kind of tissue. He also notes that internationally this claim has not been substantiated.
Courses of beauty injections, which are illegal both in the Ukraine and in Russia, are widely available and cost up to £10,000 ($145,000). Wealthy clients are told that the treatment will stop the aging process or eliminate ailments such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease. Parfitt said that one clinic said it will "take ten years off your face!"
Father Cullen said that trafficking in children and minors has been roundly condemned and that a recent Unicef conference in Manila equated the rate of abuse in The Philippines with Thailand. Father Cullen said that although it is recognised that poverty is the root cause of many abortions and also the widespread practice of parents selling their children into prostitution, the conference concluded that poverty alone is not a sufficiently compelling motive to explain such behaviour.
However, Father Cullen believes that the on-going practice hardens people's attitudes towards the practice and that often parents do not really understand exactly what they are doing as the operators of bars can paint a rosy picture in their pitch to recruit workers into their lucrative trade.
He lays much of the blame at the feet of government officials, who issue licences to these "dens of iniquity to operate." He noted that most customers in the bars of Olongapo and Angeles (the sites of the former United States naval and air force bases) are high spending foreign, sex tourists and officials turn a blind eye and ignore child abuse and the prostitution of children, including the widespread practice of abortion, so long as the dollars keep rolling in.
Father Cullen said that the depths to which the denigration of the dignity of human life and the value of the life of an unborn infant can sink, highlights the importance of the Church's pro-life stand. He said that opposition to all abortion and the resistance that various Catholic institutions have shown in various parts of the world to involving themselves with any medical treatments that use human stem cells obtained by immoral means is increasingly important and that their moral fortitude may save many lives in the future. [End]
