Why waste a perfectly good baby – when you’ve killed him?

(Please note: we are being sadly and somewhat bitterly sarcastic. We are against the killing of babies, even if magical and lucrative uses may be found for their corpses.)

Herb “clinics” or “chemists” in northern Chinese towns sell pills made from human foetuses.

Feeling low? Getting old? Take a dose of ground-up baby

The picture and quotations come from the Mail Online:

This week the South Korean customs department revealed it had foiled 35 attempts to smuggle these “human-flesh pills” across its border and seized more than 17,000 of them from China in just nine months. …

This grotesquely unsavoury industry appears to cash in on China’s strict family planning laws, which limit most families to just one child each and are said to result in 13 million abortions a year, the equivalent of more than 35,000 terminations a day.

The country, which has a population of more than 1.3 billion, is said to have ‘dying rooms’ in hospitals where unwanted newborn babies are abandoned to perish. Those trying to avoid a huge fine for violating the one-child laws have even been known to commit outright infanticide.

We maintain that abandoning newborn babies to perish is infanticide.

Now, unscrupulous pharmacists, hospital workers and even the relatives of those having abortions are making money from archaic beliefs that consuming infant cells can cure and rejuvenate us.

In fact, it is dangerous to swallow the  powdered flesh of another human being.  The pills are “likely to be poisonous”.

A South Korean television team investigating the trade, “discovered that the make-up of the pills they bought were between 97 per cent and 99 per cent human. And they all contained high levels of harmful bacteria, many of them of a type that could only have come from decomposing bodies.”

The SBS journalists saw how a foetus could be turned into pills in just two days.

Once the hospital pharmacist had defrosted the foetus stored in her kitchen fridge, she cut it into “manageable pieces”. Overnight she dried it out on absorbent paper before slowly microwaving it on a low heat.

According to the undercover team, the smell at this stage was overpowering.

So “aromatic herbs [are] added to the capsules to try to disguise the smell of rotting dried flesh.”

Hair and nails were discernible in the human material.

Once it was thoroughly dried, the pharmacist placed the flesh into a herbal grinder, not unlike a kitchen food processor, to render it down to a coarse, light brown powder, similar to the texture of human ashes following a cremation. That powder would then be put into soluble capsules which were counted out into bags for packing, shipment and sale. …

[The capsules] are believed by many to have fantastic healing powers which fight the ravages of ageing and are capable of defeating even cancer. …

The belief is that the nearer the foetus is to its birth date, the more healing properties it harbours.

One of the foetuses being pulverized, the TV team was told, was seven months old – a fully developed child ready to live outside the womb.

The footage taken by the team showed how placentas — the most common form of illegal human flesh traded in China for alternative medicine — are sold alongside the dried organs of creatures including snakes and bats from around the world to satisfy an appetite for powders, soups and potions said to have tremendous healing properties.

It is a sickening, cannibalistic and illegal trade that the Chinese authorities do not want the world to know exists. Yet it is disturbingly widespread. … While the trade in such drugs is thought to be more frequent in communist China, smugglers see the capitalist state of South Korea as an increasingly lucrative market. … The pills used to be shipped to South Korea brazenly in clear plastic cellophane bags, but more recently smugglers have had to become increasingly sophisticated and use orthodox dark brown pill bottles, with sealed caps and labelled with the names of legitimate drugs or more traditional Chinese herbal medicines to evade detection.

Plainly those Chinese authorities have more moral compunction (though not much) about the freezing, heating, grinding up, selling and eating of dead babies than they have against  killing them.

(On Chinese population control, forced abortion, and infanticide, see also our post immediately below, Environmentalism the supreme killer, May 11, 2012.)