I have known several families who have done kidney donation within their family. Being a match and keeping their loved one off the list for donation.
Which got me thinking, should we be able to sell a kidney?
The average wait time for a kidney can be 3-5 years.
Good points.
This summer pop star Selena Gomez was given a kidney by her best friend. Selena paid for her friends medical bills and I’m sure she gave her money or lavish gifts. The rich can afford whatever the phuk they want, even life.
Living donor donation is the best and most successful method of organ donation/transplant. Altruistic donation is when a living donor simply wants to give a kidney to anyone that matches their HLA...being paid for that removes the "altruism" of the donation. This is frequently visited and re-visited by organ procurement organizations in an effort to increase the transplantable organ pool. It sounds like a great idea to incentivize donation viz-a-viz paying a donor family except the fear is how did the donor die?? People kill off family members for insurance just think what they would do with a laundry list of organ values. One kidney is just about 250k U.S; if you take into account the cost of the donor management, procurement in the O.R by surgeon(s) and of course, implantation by the recipient team. Insurance foots the bill and medicare/medicaid where and when necessary.
I don't see a problem with donors compensated for the risk they take, but it's a slippery slope. If organ trade is allowed, there will be people forced to donate, it might end in situations where people are forced ti give a kidney if they can't afford rent. There are a few dystopian novels and movies about such things. These usually focus on vital organs though.
I absolutely agree that it’s a very slippery slope.
There is risk and life alterations that have to made by the person donating are great and not something to be taken lightly.
One novel I read that also was made into a movie was called “Never Let Me Go”. In the novel people made “clones” and used those clones as organ harvests. Taking even the vital organs in the end. Very thought provoking.
Buying and selling body parts is too much of a slippery slope. If people want to donate that's fine because it's for the right reason, but the second you put a price tag on it altruism goes out the door and opportunism takes over. I donated a kidney and I'd do it again if I could because the difference it made to the recipient's life was that remarkable. No amount of money could or should touch it.
Its actually legal to sell body parts "for research" if you are a broker, assuming the parts are from a cadaver. This is likely used as a loophole to send transplant material over-seas where transplants can be performed. This is probably why the FBI raided MedCure.
And just in case you needed a reason not blindly to opt into tissue donation...
Marie Gallegos, whose husband’s head was shipped to a dental school in Israel months after he died of a heart attack in May 2017. ... Six hours after he died, she said, an employee from Donate Network of Arizona called to discuss body donation. The employee promised the body would advance medical research and be treated with dignity ... Later that summer, UTN delivered her husband’s ashes, which she buried at a veterans’ gravesite. She said she did not realize the ashes represented only a portion of her husband’s remains. UTN still had his head and in the fall shipped it to the Tel Aviv dental school.
As for you question, I'm on the fence. I'm a libertarian sort of guy, but even I can see the potential for people being coerced into selling a kidney against their will. On the other hand, making it legal would end a very dangerous black market that takes more lives than it saves, and prices for an organ would drop dramatically.
If there was a mandatory 1 year waiting period between the decision and the actual sale, I think most of the drawbacks would be minimized.
If there was a mandatory 1 year waiting period between the decision and the actual sale, I think most of the drawbacks would be minimized.
Interesting idea.
Your above story about the head is dreadful. That poor wife.
Whole body donation is an option when a person is not eligible to donate any other way . For actual transplantable tissue donation, a donor has to be very "healthy" because tissue is considered "life enhancing" not "life-saving" as is organ donation. That aside, tissue donation is a wonderful way to help someone that needs a cornea or bone or skin transplant. Donating the body means it can be chopped into pieces and sent off to medical schools or whatever- that is the whole point. South Asia is notorious for kidney selling- sadly enough, many of these hapless "donors" are poor, uneducated people often ending up going into kidney failure of the remaining kidney.... Personally, after my death I'd rather be tossed in a field and left to return to the universe than be chopped into meat parcels and parked in a fridge until needed.
i think the current gray area is good enough. i mean if you have money to blow, you can put up a billboard asking for a kidney and give a 'gift' to your lifesaver. if you put an official price on it, i expect it would price more people out of it even if the price was modest and the more i'm going down the rabbit hole of the economics of pricing organs the more sure i am that that's not a path i'd like to go down. let's keep those dead drunk drivers' organs free tyvm.