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Selling my kidney

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Hotu Matua

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I think trade of organs should be made legal.

I think this trade can be moral, since I own my body, every organ of it, and it is up to me to decide to give one of them for free or in exchange for something.

Making it legal would become part of the solution of poverty and shortage of organs:

  • Thousands of people (millions, if we project it to the future) could avoid death by lack of transplant donor. Those extra productive years will help them pursue their values and the overall happiness of individuals and families.
  • Thousands / millions of poor people would get enough money to change the destiny of their families forever, by buying equipment, seeds, a car, paying for the education of their children, etc.
  • Surgeons, nurses, lab techinicians and hospitals would have more transplants to do, which would give them more revenues. Pharmaceutical companies could sell more drugs to avoid rejection and infections.
  • A new trading system will appear, based on the job of finding the right donor for the right recipient. You could find your donor on your own or hire these "transplat agencies" that would get the right one for you in no time.

What do you think?

Edited by Hotu Matua
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Next thing you know, people will be trading their labor for money.

I had to laugh at this one. I don't think anyone on this forum will ever object to anyone's sale of his own organs, when such a sale 1) does not harm him (humans can work with 1 kidney no problem) 2) he benefits from it and 3) there is a willing buyer for that value.

Definitely one of the tragedies of the modern world that Iran allows the sale of organs (and has no waiting list) yet the US doesn't (and does have a waiting list).

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Seriously though, I can't see any moral or legal loop-holes in the proposition of trading organs. It comes back to whose body is it anyway?

It does raise a whole complex issue of people pre-selling their kidneys, retinas, heart, etc., prior to their death; OH yes, and a sharp upturn in the murder rate...

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Seriously though, I can't see any moral or legal loop-holes in the proposition of trading organs. It comes back to whose body is it anyway?

It does raise a whole complex issue of people pre-selling their kidneys, retinas, heart, etc., prior to their death; OH yes, and a sharp upturn in the murder rate...

No more a problem than people being murdered for their other material possessions, and preselling is just an extension of existing "living will" laws, I'd imagine.

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