Remove the legal restrictions on people selling their own body parts, and illegal stuff would stop, the prices would drop, and the shortages of organs for research and transplantation would disappear. Free markets are a GOOD thing.
From a lawyer, in the UK
****
In debt? Want to flog one of your kidneys?
No, this isn't a joke.
With staggering amorality our medical elite
now think it's OK for us to sell our body organs.... Jacqueline Laing
Daily Mail
4 December 2003
Let us imagine that you are in desperate need of cash. Perhaps the debt collectors are knocking at your door, or perhaps you can no longer pay the mortgage.
If you are offered a simple and legal operation for a substantial sum of money, you might well be tempted to mutilate your body permanently in return for cash.
Desperate people do desperate things. But, recognising the danger that such a scenario presents to the poor and to those who may be exploited, we have, until now, placed a ban on the selling of human organs. Today, that ban looks in doubt.
Many people will have been as repulsed as I was to learn that the British Medical Association (BMA) yesterday debated the possibility of creating a legal marketplace in human organs.
John Harris, Professor of Bioethics at Manchester University, was reported to have told a group of BMA worthies that he wanted medical support for a change in the law to allow the creation of what he called 'an ethical market' in live organs.
Morality
This phrase is surely a contradiction in terms.
Any market in live organs, however well regulated, is commercially motivated. Ever since the abolition of slavery, most people have come to agree that the human body is simply not an appropriate subject for the logic of the marketplace.
Prof Harris said donors willing to sell a kidney, part of a liver or bone marrow to a sick patient, should receive payment tax-free and without loss of state benefits. They and their families should also go to the top of the transplant list if the need arose.
The fact that he came up with all kinds of elaborate ways in which his precious market could be governed and protected from exploitation suggests that somewhere, deep down, he too has grave doubts about the morality of the idea he is espousing. I hope he does.
For it appals me that a number of senior doctors have backed the idea of legalising a grotesque and shadowy black market which, until now, has existed only in impoverished and relatively lawless nations such as the former Soviet Union, China and the more deprived regions of Latin America.
How could they be so amoral?
The answer, I fear is that an arrogant medical elite, their minds firmly fixed on what they would call scientific progress, have become besotted first with the idea that the end justifies the means, and secondly with an ill-thought-out belief that people can do whatever they like with their bodies.
They believe that we 'own' our bodies in the way that we own property -- our cars, say, or our computers -- and that we are free to use or abuse them as we wish.
But this logic is entirely defective. The law has never recognised any unfettered rights of individuals to do what they want with their own bodies.
The law places great restrictions on the use of controlled drugs such as heroin and cocaine and on practices such as bigamy and incest -- even between consenting adults.
It prohibits living off the earnings of prostitution, suicide pacts, and even driving without a seat-belt.
Indeed, the law is replete with examples of how the common good may outweigh people's own desires to do what they wish with their own bodies. So the argument that people ought to be 'allowed' to trade in their body parts in this way is utterly false.
Admittedly, it is true that there is a severe shortage of organs for transplantation. The BMA estimates that 6,000 people were on waiting lists in 2002/2003, and that some 600 died while awaiting a transplant.
But that does not mean it is morally acceptable to use any means which come to hand in order to obtain those elusive organs.
Cynical
A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at 350 people in a large town in southern India who had sold their kidneys -- on average for just over £580 a time. It was a shocking indictment of the whole cynical trade.
More than 80 per cent of those who had sold a kidney said that they would not recommend the practice, while 85 per cent said that their health had declined as a result.
The vast majority had sold an organ to pay off debts, but the tragedy was that nearly 75 per cent were still in debt six years later. As for the number still living in poverty, it actually increased from 54 to 71 per cent.
In other words, the sale of their organ did not improve their lives either medically or financially. The only people it benefited were the rich and powerful who bought the organs with little thought for those whom they were exploiting.
Of course, the extremes of poverty are not as great in this country. But even in the UK, the poor would still come under intolerable pressure from the rich to sell their organs.
In 1995, the draft Mental Incapacity Bill proposed the removal of organs from non-consenting, mentally-incapacitated patients as a way of addressing our organ shortage.
Although this horrific bill has not yet become law, it raised the prospect of lawyers and next of kin authorising the rmeoval of organs from these vulnerable people.
Murder
Extending this logic to organ sales, those third parties would have a financial incentive to sell the body parts of the very person whose interests they were supposed to be upholding.
What a shocking temptation to place in anybody's way. Make no mistake, it would create a market in murder.
The truth is that buying and selling human body parts would not help the poor and vulnerable. But it would diminish human dignity and our sense of social solidarity.
What is particularly disturbing, however, is the fact that the very people who are charged with caring for and curing us are also the ones calling to use such dubious means to solve the organ shortage.
Can we be surprised, then, when we observe grotesque abuses by this medical elite in whom we place so much faith?
Cases such as the Alder Hay scandal -- in which hundreds of organs were 'harvested' from dead children and stored for medical experimentation without the approval of the grieving parents -- reveal the depths to which the medical establishment has fallen in the name of scientific 'progress.'
This latest proposal is yet another step downwards -- eroding respect for human dignity and encouraging a callousness towards the poor that is beyond contempt.
We sanction it at our peril.
Jacqueline Laing is Senior Lecturer in the
Department of Law, London Metropolitan University