Human fetuses “can make your skin smoother, your body stronger, and are good for the kidneys,” says a doctor at a hospital in Shenzen, China. In an effort to exploit this discovery, London’s Daily Telegraph reports, a growing number of Chinese doctors arc selling aborted babies to hungry consumers.

Frightened by the specter of overpopulation, the Chinese government has decreed that city dwellers may have only one child per household and that rural folk may have only two. As a result, reports the Herald of Glasgow, abortions have become a growth industry, with no fewer than 7,000 a year conducted in Shenzen alone. The upshot is a huge supply of dead babies for entrepreneurs seeking to make their way in the market-oriented environment of today’s China. Usually, however, doctors who perform abortions just cat the fetuses themselves. According to the Telegraph, “Zoo Qin, a doctor working at the Luo Hu Clinic in Shen/en, said the fetuses were “nutritious’ and claimed to have eaten 100 herself in the past six months.”

The doctors steadfastly deny that they seek to profit from the demand for fetuses. As one doctor told a reporter after showing him ten packaged fetuses, “We are a state hospital and do not charge.” Noting that the journalist looked a little ill, he gestured at the fetuses and said, “Since vou don’t look well, you can take them.”

The Chinese have also long enjoyed a good dish of placenta, and according to a separate report published in the Telegraph, they have recently resorted to eating snakes—namely pit vipers and boa constrictors. Americans might recoil from a Jeffrey Dahmer diet, but by legalizing murder, we have more or less decided that anything goes. In the 1990’s, Swift’s “modest proposal” has begun to look, well, modest.