Submitted by crinadmin on
Summary: In response to a report on the flourishing
smuggling trade in live foetuses that are
cryogenically frozen and sold to clinics
offering "youth injections", 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.
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.