In this story you can read a creepy story about people illegally selling body parts of dead people.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/09/02/philly.body.parts.ap/index.html?iref=mpstoryview
While I acknowledge that it just seems wrong to sell body parts, what I wonder is why…WHY is it wrong to sell dead people’s body parts?
The best reason I can think of is that it could lead to killing people just to sell their body parts.
Which is a pretty good reason, and indeed used to happen in (I believe) England several centuries ago when doctors would buy bodies to do autopsies on (when learning about human innards). You also don’t know what the person would have thought of the idea (unless they leave a statement, but then who’s to say they weren’t forced to write it?)
Resurrection Men, including Burke and Hare.
England? ENGLAND? ahem!
The other issue, Jack, is that the wrong people try to sell their body parts. And the reason you have the body parts in the first place, is that you need them. You can argue that there is a certain built-in redundancy, in that generally you have two lungs, two kidneys etc. But people who are short of money in the U.S. have been known to sell blood. People are already creating designer-children, engineered to assist existing siblings with medical conditions. If you were short of money and had some irritating children around, you just might be tempted to sell them for their organs. And once you have a market, you may get buyers piling on the pressure. The whole area is fraught with likely abuse. Better to prevent the situation arising.
Lung for sale! Who wants a lung? Fresh lung for sale! Fre… no! down, stupid dog! get away from that! Fresh … Half a lung! What’ll you give me for half a lung? Any takers? Half a lung! 
djm
Historically, the body-parts market leads - as markets do - into entrepreneurs going into manufacturing. The celebrated firm of Burke and Hare is an example of one such enterprise.
Larry Niven wrote of the potential effects of unbridled organ sales in his “Known Space” sagas.
Bring out ye’ dead! Bring out ye’ dead!
The Falun Gong are pretty adamant about China arresting it’s members and warehousing them in prisons for execution what a buyer shows up for their organs, too. If true, that’s about as heinous an act as I can think of.
I’m not sure exactly what you’re saying here. Could you re-word it?
China is being accused of selling the body parts of executed prisoners.
There are a lot of Falun Gong members in jail in China (as religious/political
prisoners), and they’re afraid that they’ll only be kept alive until someone
needs their kidneys.
That would be pretty bad for society, since if you need more body parts,
you might change the laws to make it easier to execute more people.
This is veering toward proctorialism, but there are claims being made often of similar occurances in the US, particularly involving illegal immigrants. I can’t speak to the accuracy of any of it.
Fact A: The Falun Gong, (somewhere between a fitness craze, cult, philosopy or a religion) are officially banned in China. Nonetheless, there are a lot of chinese members. Some, at least, are most definitely being arrested and imprisoned by Chinese authorities.
Fact B: In China, there is a market - a paid market - for transplanted organs. If you have the money and need a liver or heart, you can go to China and buy one. It is known that one source of harvestable organs is the cadavers of criminals who have been executed, China being the world leader in execution.
Assertion: The Falun Gong claim that many of their members, once arrested, are being held in prisons in China awaiting organ buyers. When foreign (or domestic) millionaire X shows up needing a heart, lung, liver etc that matches prisoner Y, Y will be executed and their organs harvested for transplant into X.
When I was in school in the 80’s, an anatomy teacher from India said that skeletons used in medical schools were bought from a religious sect that left their dead on rooftops to be picked clean by birds. Later, people were believed to be murdered for their skeletons. Then, medical schools stopped buying them (illegal like ivory? I don’t know) and you can only get plastic ‘bones’ now.
Tony
Ok, that makes sense (well, in a larger sense it doesn’t, but you know what I mean). Thanks. 
There was a touring exhibit of human bodies in various states of
dismemberment which is facing bans in many states because of
worry that the bodies were not voluntarily donated to science.
Yes, it passed through Raleigh some time ago. I personally have no religious affiliation at all, but on purely moral and humanistic grounds, I find that reprehensible.
That would be the Parsee religion (not a sect). They practice air-burial. It’s become a severe problem in recent years as the indian vultures very nearly died out as a result of anti-inflammatory drugs used on cattle. It causes kidney failure in the vultures when they eat the corpses. The numbers are apparently 1/1000th of what they were in 1992.
Apparently the vulture population crash has caused an upsurge in the population of wild dogs, which is affecting the human population: see here:
I’m guessing the Parsees are using another method of disposal of remains, possibly cremation, which does not allow re-use of the bones.
I’ve heard that trafficking is a huge problem in Oz, where it’s common to travel long distances on primitive brick roads to obtain hard-to-find parts, brains, hearts, etc. Traffickers known as wizards operate clandestinely behind closed curtains. Diminutive agents lure in visitors with dance and song, then go at you with scalpels and ice baths after spiking your fruit punch with opium poppy derivatives. The situation was exposed in a lurid color documentary in the late 1930s, and to my knowledge continues to the present day. Just horrible.
Only partially true.