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kindwords80

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In almost all countries of the world, selling a kidney is illegal, especially following an international conference in Istanbul a few years ago which urged all nations to adopt this policy. But since some countries don't have either a cadaver donor system in place, but have always relied on kidney sales (e.g., the Philippines), this policy had to be adopted in a morally absurd form, with the restriction applying only to foreigners trying to buy a kidney, but not to citizens.

 

The prohibition of kidney sales is irrational, however, since people in effect accept risks to their life and health for money which are much smaller than the health risks involved in selling a kidney, such as working as coal miners, boxers, motorcycle racers, soldiers in time of war, etc., for pay. Also, recent efforts to address the lethal shortage of kidneys for transplant have led to the widespread adoption of donor chains, in which person A afflicted with endstage renal disease has a related but non-matching donor B, which he then trades for endstage renal patient C's related but non-matching donor D, so that A gets D's kidney and C gets B's kidney. But this arrangement, which is deemed by the medical community to be ethical, is essentially the sale of the kidney available for donation to A to C, in exchange for the kidney available for donation to C going to A. So if kidneys can be sold in this way why not allow kidneys to be sold for money, the universal medium for measuring exchange values?

 

Worldwide the prohibition of kidney sales will kill about 10,000 people a year waiting for a kidney that will otherwise never come, but at least the healthy majority will not have to be irritated by having to read creepy stories about organ sales, and that's the important thing. Of course, if the healthy majority would respond to its suppression of the kidney trade by offering to donate their spare kidneys altruistically, those 10,000 deaths among renal patients would be avoided, but hey, those people aren't my problem, at least not unless they try to save their lives in some way that offends my sensibilities.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Note that it is regarded as a major felony under U.S. federal statute to transfer an organ for any 'valuable consideration.' If discovered, this is punishable by a 5-year prison sentence and a $250,000 fine. This punishment extends to the buyer, the seller, as well as to any intermediaries who further the transaction.

 

However, it may be difficult for the government to win a conviction under this statute, because the buyer and those helping him would have a defense of necessity. The defense of necessity allows a person to violate a law if in so doing he advances some vital interest -- such as saving a human life or preserving health -- at the cost of sacrificing a lesser interest, such as protecting property. Thus if you are dying of exposure on a snowy mountain, you can break into someone's cabin for shelter and you cannot be found guilty of breaking and entering or destroying private property. In the case of kidney sales, since these are necessary to save lives, the violation of the statute here may well be covered by the defense of necessity.

 

The law is murderously stupid in any case, since first society sets up a highly restrictive, medically unnecessarily strict procurement system for replacement organs, confines all those dying for lack of an organ within this lethal system, and then lets thousands of them die every year under this imprisonment. If anyone tries to save his life by buying a kidney and thus breaking out of this artificially restrictive system which permits only altruistic donations and even then under insanely stringent criteria, they punish him by refusing to die in the state-imposed inadequate substitute organ supply system! Talk about totalitarianism!

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Moderator Note

Advertisement-driven threads are not allowed on SFN, See Rules Section 2 Part 7,



I removed the contact info in the OP, so feel free to discuss the ethical considerations of organ marketing. Do NOT discuss the actual personal commitment of anything illegal, per Rules Section 2 Part 3aii.
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  • 2 months later...

Elias and Becker, one of them a Nobel-Prize winning economist, estimated in the mid-1990s that in the United States a fair price for selling a kidney would be a mere $15,000, given the very small medical risks to the donor and the time lost from work. Selling a kidney for an I-pad is a bit cheap, but then again, in the common law courts typically refuse to invalidate contracts just because the exchange seems unfair.

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