What say ye?
I own me and reserve the absolute right to do what I want with my body. My family should have the right to sell my parts for transplant after I pass, and I have the right to sell parts while I am alive. My body, my choice, that holds a logical basis in a USSC decision above that of abortion, since the fetus is not the Mothers body and deserves protection from her intentional attempts to harm him or her.
In an organ transplant, the donor who actually is giving up the organ has to do so voluntarily, but in general, gets nothing out of it than good will. Yet, the surgeon removing it gets paid to do so. The hospital that provides the ER gets to assess a fee for use of the OR. The organ transportation team gets paid to ship the organ. The transplant facility and transplant surgeon, nurses, hospital staff, etc. all get paid.
In other words, every body who has a role in transplanting an organ gets paid for their role in the procedure except the donor who made it all possible.
Doesn't seem quite fair to me.
Economist Walter Williams addressed the issue with a question.
If one can volunteer to donate a kidney, is not the kidney undoubtedly his. God given personal property?
And as such do, not property rights pertain allowing him recompense to transfer his kidney to another person?
Walter Williams came down as expected on the issue.
Well, they ‘gave’ that drunken druggie David Crosby a new liver after he had wrecked his with Hep C and booze, and then he ‘fathered’ some children for that gay singer Melissa Etheridge and her ‘wife’ (she’s already divorced Wife #2) so what the heck!
Anything goes! *SMIRK* ;)
It’s the age-old question of inalienable individual rights versus the collective good.
Your kidney, your choice. OTOH, the transplant system that is in place in most of the developed world is a huge success story in large part due to the belief - supported by evidence - that people receive organs based on nothing but necessity rather than means.
It’s a system that is very much built on trust and nothing but trust with the compact being: Sign up for an organ donor so that there’s a supply of organs that may be needed by you or someone you love.
The minute we open the organ transplant industry to free trade, that trust dies...probably deservedly. Once people believe only the wealthy can obtain organs, they’ll stop donating organs then it all collapses.
He won’t make a habit of it. Limited inventory.