‘Would they have agreed?’
Donors to both universities are not allowed to make requests about how their bodies will be used, and their families cannot obtain that information after the fact.
Adding to the controversy, donor documents reviewed by AJ+ did not indicate that the cadavers would be used to train military personnel, either from the US or Israel.
Dr Mohamad Raad, a USC-affiliated physician, questions whether the donors would have knowingly signed up if they knew their bodies would be used for procedures like perfusion.
“Regardless of whether we think it’s gruesome to do that to a dead body, the part that’s even more disturbing, honestly, to me is: Did the patient know?” Raad said.
“And by doing these procedures, coordinating with foreign armies, would they have agreed to that?”
For Jennifer Gomez, whose grandmother, Jean McNeil Sargent, donated her body to UCSD in 2012, the answer was an emphatic no.
“I didn’t realise that we were having international militaries come here to train on our families’ bodies,” Gomez told Al Jazeera. “Especially militaries that are accused of war crimes and are actively murdering people.”
Gomez’s grandmother died before UCSD started supplying cadavers for the Israeli military programme.
Still, Gomez believes donors like her grandmother deserve to know all the possible uses of their bodies before they donate.
“Most people, like my grandma, go into a decision like this thinking they’re going to do something better for the world, not thinking like, ‘Oh, I’m going to donate my body, and somehow it’s going to make some military force more powerful,'” she said.
The revelations about the training programme have even caused some prospective donors to change their minds about participating.
English professor Wendy Smith told AJ+ that she is no longer comfortable donating her body after learning about the student journalists’ report.
“I don’t want to support genocide and starvation, and I don’t want to support Israeli policies even in the smallest way,” Smith told the documentary team in April.
Both she and her husband have revoked their body donations to UCSD.
