June 7, 2012

• Selling Our Bodies

  Prostitution is the oldest trade for women in the world, but that isn’t what I am talking about here. I am talking about selling our organs for cash on the black market. Out of the nearly 70,000 kidney transplants that will happen world wide in the next 12 months, 20 percent of them will be from the black market. People desperate for cash can sell their kidneys not only in the alleys of third world nations, but here in America. 

  Organ trafficking mostly consists of kidneys, but also of half-livers, eyes, skin and blood, and is flourishing. Most of that trade can be explained by the simple laws of supply and demand. Increasing life spans, better diagnosis of kidney failure and improved surgeries that can be safely performed on even the riskiest of patients have spurred unprecedented demand for human organs. In America, the number of people in need of a transplant has nearly tripled during the past decade, topping 100,000 for the first time last October. But despite numerous media campaigns urging more people to mark the backs of their driver’s licenses, the number of traditional (deceased) organ donors has barely budged, hovering between 5,000 and 8,000 per year for the last 15 years.

  It has been shown that the organ from a live patient is going to keep you alive twice as long as one from a cadaver and you no longer need a family member to offer the donation thanks to new, powerful anti-rejection medication. 

  There is a debate on whether or not we should create a legal market for organ selling. Here is an argument I found for organ selling:

  Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who received a kidney from a friend in 2006, says:“Despite decades and decades of public education about the virtues of organ donation, the waiting list just gets longer, and the time to transplantation just gets longer. … It’s past time to face the fact that altruism is just not enough. Many people need more of an incentive to give. And that’s why we need to be able to compensate people who are willing to give a kidney to a stranger, to save a life. … We are not talking about a classic commercial free-for-all, or a free market, or an eBay system. We’re talking about a third-party payer. For example, today you could decide to give a kidney. You’d be called a Good Samaritan donor. … The only difference in a model that I’m thinking about is where you go and give your organ, and your retirement account is wired $40,000, end of story.”

  Here is one I found against organ selling:

  
  David Rothman, professor of social medicine at Columbia University and director of the Center on Medicine as a Profession, says: ”What this is really about is the sale of organs from living donors. … There are very, very good reasons — many drawn from behavioral economics, some drawn from past experience — that suggest that, in fact, to create a market might diminish the supply, not increase it. In the first instance, if I can buy it why should I give it?… In England, where the sale of blood was not allowed, rates of donation were considerably higher than the U.S., where the sale of blood was allowed.” 

  
  

   

  In black market overseas organ trafficking, people do not have the option of backing out after they have agreed to sell an organ. Dorin Razlog, a shepherd with an eighth-grade education who lives in Ghincauti, says recruiters for a trafficking ring told him cash for a kidney would lift him out of poverty. After doctors in Istanbul cut out the organ in August 2002, they paid him $7,000 — $3,000 less than they’d offered. Of that, $2,500 was in counterfeit bills, he said. 

  “They told me they would send people to destroy my house and kill my family if I went to the police,” Razlog, 30, says. Today, the money is long gone, and he sleeps on a musty mattress inside the rusting hulk of an abandoned Russian van next to a pigsty. At the end of some days, Razlog says, he’s writhing from pain in his remaining kidney.

  “The only way out is death,” he says.

  I am an organ donor on my driver’s license. Many people I know will not mark a yes for fear of not receiving life saving care in the hospital if they mark yes. They fear insurance companies, surgeons, and hospital administrations. Robin Cook does not help that fear with his medical thrillers about organ donation. I dated a transplant surgeon once with a very dark sense of humor. His solution was to make every motorcycle rider a mandatory donor, as that is where a bulk of his transplants came from. 

  This is a topic I am completely unsure of where I stand. Completely and totally undecided, which is rare. I usually sway one way or the other, but this time I am more interested in hearing what other people think. On one hand, it’s a needed commodity and legalizing will make it safer and take it away from the criminals. On the other, it’s exploiting poor people to sell their health for a financial gain that may not help them long term. I don’t know. Do you think the market for selling organs should be legal?

   

  • 11:34 am
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