There was a great article in Discover Magazine about the organ trade.
The problem is that the transaction will likely always be heavily slanted in favor of the recipient. Also, you would have to have strict oversight for people who are desperate, on both sides, not to be taken advantage of. There would have to be a set price, in my opinion, or poor people will be at a severe disadvantage. Also, the medical ethics of people having operations to sell their body parts voluntarily could be called into question.
I'm on the fence. On one hand, my body, etc., etc. On the other hand, if I can go to the bum on the street corner and offer him $500 for his kidney, who's protecting him?
Quote:What I found is borne out by Madhav Goyal, a Johns Hopkins doctor and bioethicist who interviewed more than 300 Indian men compelled to sell their kidneys in the mid-1990s. The bulk of their fees—an average of $1,070—was used to settle the debts that had driven them to make the sale in the first place. The rest was gobbled up by basic needs like food and clothing. Using the cash to start a small business, such as a tea stall or an auto-rickshaw service, remained a pipe dream.
Free-trade proponents argue that donors would fare much better under a government-regulated program, which could provide incentives such as lifelong health insurance or college tuition for the donor’s children. Scheper-Hughes counters that the concept amounts to a “kidney tax” on the poor, exacting an unfair price for basic services and opportunities. She points to Iran, which has allowed kidney donations for cash since 1988, virtually eliminating the waiting list for the organ. A survey of 500 Iranian donors who received $1,200 and a year of medical insurance from the government found that their quality of life, as measured by factors like financial condition and psychological health, remained poor three to six months after the donation. “Nobody denies that most donors live in extreme poverty; many are drug addicts,” says WHO’s Noël. “There is candid recognition in Iran now that the scheme is working well only for the recipients.”
The problem is that the transaction will likely always be heavily slanted in favor of the recipient. Also, you would have to have strict oversight for people who are desperate, on both sides, not to be taken advantage of. There would have to be a set price, in my opinion, or poor people will be at a severe disadvantage. Also, the medical ethics of people having operations to sell their body parts voluntarily could be called into question.
I'm on the fence. On one hand, my body, etc., etc. On the other hand, if I can go to the bum on the street corner and offer him $500 for his kidney, who's protecting him?
"There remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking." ~Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great
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