Be an organ donor

I read this article this morning on Slate.com about the worldwide market in organ donorship. The article is from April of this year. The image on the left is from the article.

I don't really know what to say or how to comment. Here's an exerpt:

The key to reversing the organ market is to turn that equation on its head. Stop fighting capitalism, and start using it. What's driving the market is scarcity. Americans, Britons, Israelis, Japanese, and South Koreans are going abroad for organs mostly because too few of their countrymen have agreed to donate organs when they die. Some have religious objections. Others are squeamish. Many figure that if they don't supply the organs, somebody else will.

They're right. Somebody else will supply the organs. But that somebody won't be a corpse [emphasis mine]. He'll be a fisherman or an out-of-work laborer who needs cash and can't find another way to get it. The middlemen will open him up, take his kidney, pay him a fraction of the proceeds, and abandon him, because follow-up care is just another expense. If he recovers well enough to keep working, he'll be lucky.

The surest way to stop him from selling his kidney is to make it worthless, by flooding the market with free organs. If you haven't filled out a donor card, do it now. Because if the dying can't get organs from the dead, they'll buy them from the living.

I have heard of this before. I'm struck this time by this sentence - "Twice in the last two weeks, transplant experts from around the world have convened in Europe to discuss the emerging global market in human flesh.

Human flesh. Human bodies are a multibillion dollar enterprise internationally but usually discussed in the context of prostitution, sex trafficking, and slavery. But what about the bodies themselves? What about the "extra" organs like kidneys and livers that are sometimes the last resource the world's poor have, and the world's wealthy are able to purchase? Should we acknowledge the reality of the world and create rules and structure to regelate it? Or should we resist the desperation and fight defiantly against it, and make it illegal while encouraging Americans and first-world nations to become organ donors?

I don't know. It doesn't seem cut and dry. It's not fair that global tsunami victims are selling parts of their own bodies to survive but it doesn't seem fair for me to say no to that either. Who am I to make it illegal? And yet I can't not look at the complete lack of healthcare and medical follow-up offered to these donors.

I don't know. But this makes me sad. What can our wealth not buy, if we can buy the very organs from another human and the health that comes from that? If we are basically paying with dollars, with cash, with a credit card, for life but by doing that we are taking life from another. We are increasing his or her risk for illness, decreasing their ability to donate to a dying relative if needed. We are increasing the gap between the have-nots and the haves.

Yet if I am dying or a relative and with money that is relatively easy for us to attain, we are able to save our lives while giving money to someone who needs it who is willing to offer up what is at that moment "extra" for food and life now, what would I do?

I don't know.

*And I don't know why the spacing won't show up in my post. Sorry for the jumbled mess. Grr.

**Addendum: One reason I wrote this was to encourage everyone to be an organ donor where you live. I hope that point came across.