Organ Harvesting for fun and profit...

[booley]

Ok, this has go to be one of the sickest things I have heard to date. granted, even a lot of other cons seem to think this is a stupid idea if you read the article. (well they think it's stupid to a point, it seems) but ti reminds me of something I once read ina book called Moral politics.
Conservatives, it sems, often beleive that one's success in life is a sign of one's moral charector. So naturally the rich do deserve more becuase otherwise they wouldn't be rich (and conversly, the poor are bad becuase if they weren't bad, they wouldn't be poor)
This guy seems to just be taking this idea to it's logical conclusion...

"It was gratifying news when fans around the country volunteered to donate their kidneys to basketball star Alonzo Mourning, who would otherwise have to cut short his career because of life-threatening medical problems with his own kidneys. However, the head of the New York Organ Donor Network said that it was a shame "that it takes a personal tragedy of someone famous like Alonzo to raise awareness" of a need for organ donations when 17 people on the waiting list die daily.

 What is an even bigger shame is that laws block the supply of organs to people who may be dying needlessly as a result.

 Take the case of Alonzo Mourning and suppose that not a living soul was willing to give him a kidney. He was going to have to either give up a $23 million a year career or risk death by subjecting his kidneys to the stresses of playing. Suppose the law allowed him to offer half of that amount to anyone who would sell him a kidney.

 Do you doubt that there would be someone willing to part with a kidney for that kind of money? There might well have been even more people willing to part with a kidney than there were.

 I happen to know a lady who was born with three kidneys -- and in poverty. Do you think she would have minded parting with a spare kidney, in order to have a better life for herself and her children?

 With more than 80,000 people on waiting lists for various organs, and many dying while waiting, why prevent such transactions? One reason is that third parties would be offended.

 You know the words and the music: How terrible that the rich can buy other people's body parts -- and that the poor are so desperate as to sell.

 If you think that you have a right to forbid other people from making such voluntary transactions, then you are saying that your delicate sensibilities are more important than the poverty or even the deaths of other people.

 Banning organ sales does nothing to make the poor less poor. Nor do those 80,000-plus people on waiting lists have to be rich. Three economists have estimated the cost of buying an organ in a free market at a price well within most people's budgets.
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 The trump card of the left is always "the poor." But, if our real concern is the poor, the money to pay for them to receive organ transplants can be paid by others, whether the government or philanthropic individuals or organizations.

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 It is not just the political left that stands in the way of allowing more organs to be made available through the free market to those who are dying. An article in the neo-conservative quarterly The Public Interest argued that non-profit organizations alone should be allowed to handle any financial transactions if organ sales are permitted.
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 Like other bureaucracies, the organ donation bureaucracy produces arbitrary rules. These rules have kept people from getting organ transplants that were available because they were not available in the particular regions where they happened to live.

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 People who think that they should be the arbiters of other people's destinies are bad enough when they want to choose winners and losers in industry and commerce. But when they want to choose who lives and who dies, that is a little much."

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20031202.shtml

[SheilaT]

1. What WOULD the free market

price of a kidney be?

I have a brother on the transplant list for a kidney. This past Friday he got the good news, after only four years of waiting, that one was available. It was only after he'd been put under anesthesia, although luckily before he'd been cut, that the doctors realized all of the organs from that particular donor were unusable. So it's back to waiting. Personally, I'd rather see mandatory harvesting of organs from all -- an opt-out rather than an opt-in system.

[izzie]

2. I will bet it gets into the free market.

People will buy anything.

[booley]

3. what freaked me out

is supposedly there is an underground in trading human body parts. Not for organ transplants but becuase people get off on it.

as for this article, I guess I just couldn't beleive how far down some cons could go. I mean, whats next? Delay giving business leadership awards to drug dealers for "pulling" themselves out of poverty?

This article was posted on another forum by a con so apparently the idea of organ harvesting resonates with some of them....

[DUreader]

4. You can already go outside the US for this

[SheilaT]

5. You mean the kidney that my brother didn't get?

No. It would have been destroyed. The donor died of brain cancer, and because apparently brain cancer itself never spreads, they thought the organs were good to use. But when they looked a little closer, the doctors realized the cancer had originate elsewhere and didn't dare use them.

The real shame is that my brother's blood type is B+, and all last year the medical center he's getting his surgery at (in Tucson, AZ) did not do a single type B organ transplant.