In May, I posted on an exhibit currently in Durham called Bodies: The Exhibition. At the city’s newest mall, the show features “plastinated” bodies posed to show the workings of muscles, ligaments, bones and internal organs. “Plastination” preserves living tissue, and these are real human beings.
As I noted, the problems with the exhibit are numerous. Many of the bodies come from China, with its robust and largely unregulated market in human parts. Whether these people were executed prisoners, a possibility, or the poor, unclaimed at morgues, hardly matters. Premier Exhibitions, the host, cannot adequately show who they are or whether they gave permission to be put on display and turned into cash corpses.
I wrote what I thought would be a lonely letter to our local newspaper, the Raleigh News and Observer. But luckily, another outraged person, Sarah Redpath, also protested what was a clear insult to human dignity. Now, Redpath has created a fantastic web site for a new organization, No bodies 4 profit. Online, you can sign a petition that calls for legislation banning the use of bodies without consent for commercial purposes. Amazingly, Redpath has also met with a leading educator in North Carolina who agrees that field trips to this sideshow are not educational — piercing a key claim of the hucksters behind this travesty.
Help Redpath out by signing this petition and writing your state and federal officials urging them to support a ban on this type of for-profit exhibit. Human rights thrives from the actions of individuals like Redpath, who see an injustice and choose to do something about it. Adelante, Sarah!!!!