> You'd be amazed how bad hospitals can be at keeping track of fairly critical things.
Got to experience that first-hand when my partner lost her pregnancy. We went in for the procedure to remove the nonviable fetus and were advised we had 14 days to arrange for a mortuary to take the remains if we wished to keep them, which we did. At 7 days when the mortuary tried to arrange for pick-up, we were informed that the hospital had disposed of the remains. It was "very uncommon" for people to want to take the remains, so they got lax in following their procedure and jumped the guns. Left us nothing to take home. It still sucks.
that stuff is worth a lot, probably went to the highest bidder, tissue banks, stem cells, ... they probably tell the same to all the parents, to redirect the anger towards some average Jane and Joe... while trying not to visualize the ice and careful packaging in which they got it "disposed off" through some medical courier.
(sarcasm warning) But who can fault them, imagine they had to explain to each pair of parents from scratch what is happening behind the scenes, and how such decisions are being made with little to no public discussion let alone democratic oversight? The time it would take compared to the harvesting itself would be intolerable. Intolerable! Not to speak of having to invest in bulletproof panes from behind which they would quickly learn to explain all this.
I'm not OP but John Oliver had a pretty good episode about hospitals, organ donation organisations and even non-profits, all benefit from a opaque system intentionally designed to hide where bodies go when "disposed" -- Here's a youtube link to the episode (may be blocked in certain regions due to copyright) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn7egDQ9lPg
Got to experience that first-hand when my partner lost her pregnancy. We went in for the procedure to remove the nonviable fetus and were advised we had 14 days to arrange for a mortuary to take the remains if we wished to keep them, which we did. At 7 days when the mortuary tried to arrange for pick-up, we were informed that the hospital had disposed of the remains. It was "very uncommon" for people to want to take the remains, so they got lax in following their procedure and jumped the guns. Left us nothing to take home. It still sucks.