Posted on 12/17/2006 9:38:10 AM PST by wagglebee
In the midst of growing interest in reports of a gruesome stem-cell and human-organ black market that traffics in newborn babies taken from their mothers, an investigator looking into the matter has been sacked "for political reasons," she says, because she was getting too close to the truth.
Several reports in British papers last week told the story of a video showing a post-mortem examination of infants of Ukrainian mothers who believe their babies were stolen from them at birth.
The video was given to reporters by a charity worker representing 300 families who believe their healthy babies were falsely declared dead by staff at a maternity hospital in the Ukraine's most easterly city of Kharkiv.
Due to pressure from families, authorities agreed in 2003 to exhume the babies' bodies for examination. A senior British forensic pathologist who has viewed the video says that what he's seen does not look like standard post-mortem practice, the BBC reported.
The video shows severed limbs and torsos with organs, including brains, stripped away.
The thorough dismemberment of the bodies has led some to believe that, if the grisly evidence points to the babies having been murdered, the hospital may be supplying harvested stem cells from bone marrow to an underground market.
The Ukraine has become the destination of last resort for many sufferers of incurable diseases as well as those seeking cosmetic rejuvenation who come from all over the world for stem-cell injection therapy. Treatments cost as much as $24,000 in Ukraine and much more in the West.
Critics not only question the value of stem cells to treat many of these disease but also the choice of treatment regimes and even how clinics there are able to acquire sufficient material to provide a commercial service.
Officially, the cells are taken from aborted fetuses with the mothers' consent, but, given the hundreds of Ukrainian women who have complained of newborns stolen and the recently surfaced post-mortem video, the government authorized an investigation into whether a trade in babies-killed-to-order exists.
One of those investigators was Irina Bogomolova, who worked in the chief prosecutor's office in the capital, Kiev. But, she says, she's been removed from the case after demanding that the inquiry be expanded beyond Kharkiv's maternity hospital.
"I was sacked for political reasons," Bogomolova told the London Telegraph. "I demanded an investigation into all maternity wings in hospitals across Ukraine and I was relieved of duty after making that demand."
The Council of Europe is scheduled in February to investigate allegations that newborn babies have been killed to provide stem cells and internal organs. Officials will focus on the role, if any, played by Ukranian research centers and maternity hospitals in the international trade in stem cells.
An earlier investigation in 2004 was dropped for lack of firm evidence, but the latest charges have caused the case to be reopened.
However, the sacked Irina Bogomolova won't be taking part.
"A trade in stem cells exists here ... I suspect there is a lot of bribery going on, right up to highest levels," she charged.
"Pregnant women, especially from rural areas, are very vulnerable targets as they will obviously believe whatever the doctors tell them. It's easy to take their babies from them and tell them they died or were born dead due to complications."
Pro-Life Ping
Ping
That's an exceptionally high and mathematically unlikely number of fatalities for a single maternity hospital.
This kind of criminality and predation on a population that is already under pressure is very sad.
We're not told the time period she's investigating. Over say, 5 years, it's not that implausible. Nor do we know the size of the hospital and how many births it handles per day. The Soviet era was fond of making small numbers of huge facilities/factories/whatever rather than managing lots of little ones
If I were a Ukrainian mother about to give birth, I'd be tempted to stay at home and be attended by a midwife.
bump
Ping!
I'm surprised she wasn't given a paladium cocktail (or whatever that poison was that killed the russian dude) http://sacredscoop.com
I think the Russians will be laying low on poisoning their enemies for a little while. (Of course, they may revert to Stalinist methods of hacking people to death with axes.)
It should be easy to change hospital practice so babies room in with their mothers and any babies who die are taken by their families for burial.
FR has had articles about the Carribean clinics using stem cells from aborted babies from Ukraine but this is a new one.
I am surprised there is not a black-market trade in babies for adoption which might be even more profitable than organ harvesting. Evil evil people if this is true (WND taken with a grain of salt.)
Mrs VS
If true, this is sickening to me. It didn't really hit me how awful this is until I was telling husband about it. He is so angry about this.
The story also reminds me that Ukraine decided to stop all foreign adoptions within the last year. I don't know if that ban was lifted.
You would think that a live adoptable baby would be more valuable. But the Ukraine does not allow newborns to be adopted. And they stopped all foreign adoptions sometime within the past year or two.
One wonders how much "our" abortion mills engage in these vile practices.
lol yeah, much less conspicuous, but then again, they've never been very secretive about their assasination methods lol
Fetal tissues harvested for research was already a billion dollar plus market. Add this hravesting for stem cell lines and it jumps noticeably higher. Evil parades proudly where God has been 'cleansed from the public psyche'. Our democrats and a few Republicans (including the disgraceful Frist) are pushing now for embryo harvesting to be funded with federal dollars ... cannibalism on the dole in America; who woulda thunk it fifteen years ago, but then we lived through the clinton era. Aren't we so lucky to be facing eight years of hatellary rodhamster after two years of democrat efforts to run the nation including White House policy?
City is a large one, industrial, and the hub of a large rail and river transport net. 300 babies over more than one year could fall between the cracks.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.