With the gifts from my sister Perri, three lives were saved and many others have been changed. To me, there is nothing more special than the gift of life. Knowing Nicole saved so many lives through her gifts, I feel such peace and calmness in my heart. Did you know there are nearly 2, people waiting for a lifesaving transplant in our region?
One single donor can save up to eight lives through organ donation and save or heal more than 75 lives through tissue donation. For their contacts and services, brokers, private hospitals, and physicians earn enormous profits. It is estimated that more than kidneys since have been sold annually in India to wealthy recipients from the Middle East, the Far East, and Europe. The phenomenon has alarmed the medical profession, the public, and many governments and has been condemned by all major religions and most transplant societies.
The author also condemns the sale of human organs as being damaging to the cause of transplantation as well as many other moral, religious, and ethical values and beliefs of society. The implausibility of these absolute positions regarding selling and buying of internal organs suggests that the moral permissibility of markets for organs is a complex and context-dependent issue.
According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 10, black market operations involving purchased human kidneys now take place per year. Vendors in such markets, who are typically very poor, undergo serious psychological and physical harms.
Proponents of kidney sales insist that regulated markets would not have these dismal effects on vendors. Proposals for such markets incorporate provisions aimed at ensuring the safety of sellers and recipients, for example, through thorough donor screening processes and proper postoperative care. As I have argued elsewhere , even full compliance with the rules of a regulated market would fail to ensure its ethical acceptability.
The existence of such a market might harm poor people. For example, aggressive debt collectors might force the poor to sell the fungible assets they always carry with them: their kidneys. If the United States legalizes markets in kidneys, would not other countries follow, among them some who have had an active illicit trade?
These countries , including Brazil, India, Pakistan and the Philippines, seem to have high levels of corruption and thus ineffective regulatory infrastructures. It is reasonable to worry that the kinds of harm that accrue to kidney vendors in unregulated markets would also befall them in some regulated markets.
Whether we should adopt a regulated market in kidneys turns not only on moral argument, but also on whether doing so would actually increase supply. A recent systematic review of studies found support for the hypothesis that offering financial incentives for blood does not increase its supply.
Of course, effects of payment might differ for blood and for kidneys. People who would otherwise have donated an organ might refrain from doing so if providing one has connotations not of moral virtue but of financial interest. It remains unclear how much regulated markets would actually increase supply. In any case, such markets should prompt ethical concern, especially regarding their impact on the very poor.
Most of us reject the idea that the end justifies the means: we believe that some means would be wrong to take even to a good end like increasing the supply of kidneys for transplant. Under present societal conditions, markets would, I suspect, be among such ethically unacceptable means.
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