If there were not gruesome pictures that go along with this story, I may have doubted its veracity. It is just too horrible. A Russian news outlet is reporting that 248 human fetuses aged 12 weeks gestation were found discarded in the Ural mountains. Speculation is that these little lives were victims of legal (and illegal) abortion and possibly slated to be used in research or harvested for valuable fetal stem cells. From RT.com: (Warning graphic photos, image courtesy NTV coverage video)
Medical experts and investigators are pondering the origins of more than 200 human fetuses found disposed in the Urals. Speculation ranges from illegal abortions to illegal stem-cell research.
The discovery of 248 human fetuses near the town of Nevyansk in the Urals sent waves through the medical community in Russia, raising questions as to why and how the fetuses, aged 12-16 weeks, ended up in the forest near a highway.
Officials already believe the fetuses are from at least four different medical institutions. Some of them may be more than a decade old.
All the fetuses are now undergoing forensic examination at a local hospital in an attempt to discover more details which may shed light on the case.
Police officials say negligence on behalf of company which provided disposal of biological waste for several hospitals in the region is most likely responsible for the incident. They add right now none of the medical institutions are under suspicion for questionable activity.
However, before any definite ruling is made by investigators, many in the medical field propose their own version of events.
The head of the State Duma committee on Family, Women and Children, Elena Mizulina, believes the fetuses were intended for pharmacological and cosmetological purposes.
“It’s possible there was some kind of medical or law enforcement inspection coming up, so someone wanted to get rid of incriminating evidence,” she said in an interview to newspaper Izvestia.
Mizulina said fetuses at this stage of development are especially valued by pharmacologists and cosmetologists since they present a great source of stem cells. “The demand for such “material” is huge.”
Some believe the fetuses were “leftovers” of a negligent experiment: “I wouldn’t be surprised if at the end it turned out that someone was gathering research material for a dissertation, and then just threw it away in this manner,” said an unidentified doctor in an interview to Gazeta.ru.
Gynecologist Yuliana Abaeva also believes the fetuses may have been intended to serve as the source of vaccines: “It could be an unused abortive material for vaccines or fetal therapy, which is a cell therapy, extremely popular in cosmetology,” she said in an interview to Russian News Service.
I have said it many times. We abandon the human embryo at our own peril. Once we see one segment of our species as harvestable biological material, more and more of us start looking like meat for harvest as well. It doesn’t matter if stem cells or research was the intended use for these innocent lives or not. It is telling that so many are speculating that it was. Culture of death indeed.
