A bizarre story, to be sure, but the reason I put this here is because so often I see people heading to our local blood donor office, trying to scrape up enough money to survive for another day that I've often wondered if, given the chance, whether they would sell a body part if they could.
I know in my own experience, at various points when I was really down on my luck, I probably wouldn't have thought twice about selling a kidney if it would have provided me with enough money to extricate my dumb ass from the misery I had created for myself. Desperation often leads to desperate acts.....
In a semi-related note, one of my mother's favorite jokes was as follows:
How do you cook kidneys? Fry the piss outta them...
(Please send all boos and hisses to my mother, but I would add that she would probably like to remain resting in peace)
Ana Lita.
The Humanist. Washington, DC:
Mar/Apr 2008. Vol. 68, Iss. 2; pg. 6, 2 pgs
PROGRESS IN MEDICAL SCIENCE and technology has contributed to the growth of kidney and other organ transplantations around the world. Nevertheless, the gap between the supply and demand for transplantable organs continues to widen. In Europe, the average waiting time is three years and is expected to lengthen to ten years by 2010. With 120,000 patients on chronic dialysis and 40,000 patients waiting in line for a kidney in Western Europe alone, about 15 to 30 percent of these patients will die annually because of organ shortages.
To avoid death, many patients turn to organ trafficking. Unsurprisingly, various untoward individuals see organ shortages as an easy opportunity for money by pressuring the global poor into selling their organs. The potential for large profits drives their interest: kidney sellers are paid approximately $2,500 to $3,000, while recipients pay anywhere from $100,000 to $200,000.
To examine this issue, the IHEU-Appignani Center for Bioethics-co-sponsored by the UN Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women and the Council of Europe-convened an expert panel discussion, "Intersecting Human Rights Crises: Organ Transplantation and Organ Trafficking." Approximately one hundred people attended, including students, journalists, professors, physicians, and humanists.
During the discussion, various ethical, medical, social, and legal questions were raised, including: whether the poor should provide for the health of the rich, if the price to get out of poverty should be to sacrifice one's health, if poverty should compromise human dignity and health, and whether stopping or inappropriately discouraging organ transplants would contribute to unnecessary deaths.
Professor Art Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania stated that the organ market was at times unethical and inefficient. This viewpoint was challenged by audience members, who pointed out that the disparity between supply and demand suggests why traffickers would rise to meet a need, though it doesn't necessarily explain why people would reluctantly offer themselves, or a part of themselves, up in exchange for money.
Professor Caplan noted that members of Falun Gong, a banned religious group in China, have long worried that their practitioners in Chinese prisons or labor camps have been used as a source of organs for rich transplant patients. An audience member mentioned an investigative report by David Kilgour, a former member of the Canadian Parliament, and David Matas, a human rights attorney, on their findings concerning these allegations. The report presents various documents, witness testimonies, and phone calls in which Chinese hospitals acknowledged organs from Falun Gong practitioners were available.
Rachel Mayanja, UN Special Advisor on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women, highlighted the critical importance of poverty to organ trafficking. The extent that which those living in poverty have no choice was subject to debate. All panelists agreed that reducing global poverty and illiteracy were essential components to eliminating organ trafficking.
Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, the Deputy Secretary General of the Council of Europe, emphasized the need for coordinated government efforts to combat organ trafficking. Despite formal admonishment of the trade in body parts, embodied in the Councils Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine, there is currently no explicit provision against organ trafficking for the European Convention or the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime.
Professor Khalid Butt of the Westchester Medical Department of Surgery and Transplantation also touched on the role of poverty in organ transplant donors. Noting the first kidney transplant in 1954, the discussion focused on the germinal reason for organ transplants-saving lives. He presented three reasons for organ transplants: emotional, altruistic, and economic, and suggested that in order to improve organ donations, it is necessary to improve the donors primary health care and follow-up medical care.
Professor Thomas Diflo of the NYU Medical Center's Department of Surgery (Transplant), noted that most healthcare-related professional organizations in the United States formally oppose organ markets or financial incentives for donation, and that data from the organ trade in India suggests that paid donors are left no better off financially in the long run. He also remarked that marketed organs are often of poorer quality and confer increased risks of rejection upon their recipients. He mentioned his own experience as a transplant surgeon, when a Chinese-American patient returned from China after receiving an organ transplant from an executed prisoner, thereby raising important ethical questions in his own mind. In what way, if any, should his relationship with this patient change? Should continuing to take care of his patient be considered implicit endorsement of transplant tourism?
Potential solutions emerging from this panel included erecting a more extensive legal framework against organ trafficking, initiating measures to improve health in "donor countries," identifying illegal donors, and denying medical insurance for patients who have received a transplant from abroad. The panelists believed that criminal responsibility should include everyone involved in the trafficking transplantation process, including brokers, intermediaries, and the actual donor. The future of organ trafficking and transplantation throughout the world may well lie in the enactment of the panelists' recommendations.
| [Author Affiliation] |
| by Ana Lita, Ph.D. |
| [Author Affiliation] |
| Ana Lita, Ph.D. is director of the IHEU-Appignani Center for Bioethics, a non-governmental organization providing research and analyses of bioethical challenges facing the global community. |
