Trafficking in human organs is a crime that occurs in three broad categories, according to the United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking (UN GIFT):
- First, there are cases where traffickers force or deceive the victims into giving up an organ.
- Second, there are cases where victims formally or informally agree to sell an organ and are cheated because they are not paid for it, or are paid less than the promised price.
- Third, vulnerable persons are treated for an ailment, which may or may not exist, and thereupon organs are removed without the victim’s knowledge.
“Routine” (i.e., non-therapeutic) circumcision of infants and children falls into the first and third categories of human organ trafficking.
Every single infant foreskin acquired by a biotech or cosmetics company is stolen from its rightful owner — a baby whose foreskin or penis needed no “treatment.” Parental “consent” doesn’t let the thieves off the hook, either. We all know the law doesn’t allow you to sell or “donate” something that doesn’t belong to you. Parents don’t own their children’s bodies, and they cannot legally sell or give away their children’s healthy kidneys, eyes, or any other body part — no matter what their motive, or how useful that tissue might be to somebody else.
Whether delivered to the commercial laboratory of ATCC (which sells “primary epidermal keratinocytes [from] normal human neonatal foreskin”), or ultimately used in Oprah’s favorite face cream SkinMedica® (whose TNS Recovery Complex® has “a bit of an unusual scent” due to its “very high concentration of protein”), or for wound-healing Vavelta® (which boasts of its use of high-quality “neonatal donor cells”), every foreskin found in these products has been taken from its rightful owner, a baby who has not agreed to part with it and who will receive no benefit from its sale. All of these companies are engaging in a form of human trafficking — the illegal sale of body parts.