Is selling human organs ethical?

[Unorthodox]

Commercial on the radio on the way in, plugging some news report tonight.


Premise:  I'll give you 50k for your kidney.  Should this be allowed to happen? 

[Unorthodox]

The very topic makes me think of this....

do not click play if you have a weak stomach, even though this is of poor quality...

! Repo! The Genetic Opera: Thankless Job

[Buster's Uncle]

There's so much potential for ugly problems.  I don't know that I'd oppose, but people would be right to find it squicky and discomforting...

[Lorizael]

Selling organs is illegal for the same reason prostitution is illegal; it's too easy for people to be exploited in really horrible ways. However, I do think prostitution should be legal... and highly regulated. In principle, I don't see why that particular line of argument shouldn't apply to the organ trade as well.

That said, we're going to be able to grow organs on demand in the not too distant future, so I'd really rather we don't need such an industry to pop up. (I've seen articles where new body parts get grown on mice. A neat, terrible SF story might be a future in which the body parts do better if grown on humans, so people get paid to be body part/organ farms, selling off new parts of their body whenever they're fully formed.)

[DrazharLn]

Another concern, not so present with prostitution, is of informed consent.

How difficult is it to explain the risks to a potential donor?

I think there should be an argument from equality, too.

[Buster's Uncle]

As in [fuddle-duddle] the rich people literally buying the poor - piecemeal?  Yeah; that's one of the ugly problems I ment.

[Rusty Edge]

Yeah, it's problematic.

I used to be pretty passionate about organ donation discussion, as an outgrowth of reading Gil Hamilton and giving it a lot of thought.

Yes, poor people would be exploited.  That assumes and implies that organ donation doesn't already exploit them.

My memory is fuzzy on this one, but here's the general idea-

Take the case of my former governor, Robert P. Casey ( you may have heard of him as a pro-life Democrat ). Anyway, as gov. he had great health insurance. He also had an obscure untreatable disease, which could be cured with a liver ( l think ) transplant.  He got on the list and shortly thereafter an inner city black died tragically and Casey got the call and the surgery.

The donor family lost their breadwinner and got billed for trauma care, the hospital and surgeons took in mega-bucks, and the governor got a new lease on life.

But that's also what happens- the head trauma victims make the best donors, and the donor families often have considerable expenses, such as helicopter life-flight rides. The hospital parcels out the spare parts to multiple patients and gets wealthy in the process. The doctors prosper too.

I get a little cynical about well intentioned legislation that makes donation the default and/prohibits the family from getting compensation.


OKAY- something wacky was going on, this is what I could recover of a long post.