Right or wrong?
On the one hand, there is a shortage of organs available.
On the other hand, having poor people seriously compromise their health for a quick bit of money doesn’t seem right.
As you point out, good points can be made in support of either side of the argument. Personally, I would prefer a much simpler, more efficient, and humane solution: mandatory organ harvesting following death (circumstances permitting).
Organs are an integral part of the church experience. If they don’t pay for organs how will they have such beautiful music.
I don’t care about either point you raised…
My organs are my own, and I can’t see how the government/society should have any say about what I can do with my own organs.
So, I suppose that means no forced harvesting nor any prohibitions against selling them.
Huh? I can see your argument against banning sale while alive (though I think there are a few gaps in it) but in what sense are your organs your when you are dead? Dead people don’t own things.
Ever read The Jigsaw Man, a short story by Larry Niven?
So, your body becomes property of the state/society? If anything, it becomes property of your heirs, I suppose.
Or Caught in the Organ Draft, by Robert Silverberg
Let’s take a quick, basic look. There are plenty of organs, and people will offer them readily if allowed to be paiod. Paid-for organs are not going to be radically mroe expensive than otherwise int he finaly tally, and we’d suddenly have no shortage.
Moreover, the compensation is fundamentally sane. Organ transplantation is risky, botha t the time of surgery and later. I certainly won’t do it because I value my life and dont’ want to abandon such family as I may have if the worst happens. With a payment, I have a much more concrete reason to act. And other nations have instituted this without problems.
For once, Iran and Venezuela are ahead of us.
Why assume that property exists in a human body?
Paying for organs?! Gee, I usually have to pay people to take mine . . .
Banning the sale of organs is a form of price control, which causes shortages and surpluses. In this case, it causes a quite fatal shortage of life-saving organs. It makes no sense at all for the government to mandate a price of zero for a highly sought after and scarce good that benefits society immensely.
Basically, if you actually want more organs going to more sick patients, you need an organ market to create the incentive. If you want to stick to some sort of luddite morality while watching people die needlessly while waiting for organs, you have a warped sense of priority to say the least.
I disagree with price controls in general, but this is one of the most egregious examples of how terrible the effects can be.
In the same vein, here’s an idea to solve all our health care problems in this country: Just create a law banning the sale of medicine or medical services! Doctors and pharmaceutical companies really shouldn’t be motivated by profits anyway, but by the goodness of their hearts, right? Just make it illegal for doctors and pharmacists to demand payment for their goods and services!
Poor people will have no problem getting quality health care now that it is free, right? Greed will be abolished from the health care industry! There’s no way this plan can go wrong!
I agree. The State protects us all during life - building roads, infrastructure, police and military forces, and so on. It’s only appropriate that, when we are done with our bodies, the State should use them to protect others.
People are allowed to risk their lives for money in plenty of other ways. I can choose to be a commercial fisherman, or a fireman. I don’t understand what’s wrong with selling organs.
The only reason that this could be justified is over concerns that people’s organs could be harvested without their informed consent. But then, we have people wanting to harvest organs without consent right now, so that’s rather a moot point.
My off-the-cuff answer is that the sale of organs could be permitted with sufficient government oversight, but only for cash (to the donor or to their estate). And the harvesting of organs without the consent of the donor should carry the death penalty.
Well, it does. For the donor.
Am I the only one that things an open market for organs is just too, too tacky?
Yes. We don’t make things illegal just because they’re tacky.
How would an open market affect things like
War crimes in the Kosovo War - Wikipedia?
Have you even read that page? EULEX found no evidence that the claim was true, and their attempts to collect evidence from the person who made the claim came up empty. It’s indistinguishable from blood libel.