Selling Human Organs: The Ethical Issue
Selling body transplants is one of the latest ventures that entrepreneurs have devised. Some see it as servicing a public good, whilst others perceive it as one more example of capitalism at its worst.
Barry Jacobs is an example of an international broker for bodily parts whose business involves matching up kidney "donors" with patients needing kidney transplants. The donor receives a magnanimous paycheck; the recipient receives a healthy kidney, and Jacobs, himself, profits by business in worse ways (Chapman, 1984). Jacobs and other advocates of organ-selling see this business as filling a necessary void. Approximately, 100,000 organ transplants are needed per annum, and only an annual 10,000 are performed due to the deficiency of matching organs. Biomedical breakthroughs have increased the success of these operations, but the procedures cannot always be accomplished due to depletion of stocks. People are simply not willing to donate their organs, resulting in the proposal that non-vital organs be sold in order to make up for the deficiency.
The following essay argues the ethical issues of this contention.
Advocates of human organ-selling
Advocates maintain that we have a moral obligation to save lives and to reduce suffering. Thousands of people, however, are dying due to the lack of bodily organs. People wait for years until someone is willing to donate an organ and then they wait further hoping it is the right one. In the meantime, they are sucked into lengthy painful treatments and government coffers get emptied due to the costliness of the dialysis treatment. We are paying unnecessary taxes -- proponents of the organs-for-sale scheme argue -- just because we have squeamish ethical scruples about selling the necessary organs. These organs are invaluable. People's lives depend on them. They would never receive them unless others were offered money to sell them. The enterprise is important because not only are poor people receiving money for selling something...
In theory, such evaluations could be useful, but as is, they are fairly useless. Plus, the validity and necessity of evaluations are up for debate themselves, besides the actual results from the evaluations being up for debate. Thus, the bioethical dilemma in those who abuse their bodies before and after receiving organ transplants lies not necessarily just with the recipients, but also with society, and with the medical field with
Ethical Considerations Behind Organ Transplants The idea of organ transplants has suffered several criticisms over the years from the civil society, to the various religious groups and even philosophers. It is challenging to have one perspective on the idea of transplants and apply it universally since not everyone will share the religious view, or the philosophical view. In the context of this memorandum, the utilitarian philosophy will be the baseline for
In the U.S. For instance, Abuona (2003) indicated that the very first criterion is the donor's geographic location as compared to that of the recipient followed by the histocompatibility matching and blood group compatibility. The third criterion is a point system that each of the waiting-list patients accumulate in regard to the following variables; waiting time, medical urgency, as well as the age of the patient. This allocation technique
Organ Transplantation Denying Mrs. Burgone the organ transplant could be ethically justified under certain conditions and circumstances. However, denying her organ transplantation surgery under these circumstances is not one of those instances and cannot be ethically justified. The decision is arbitrary and serves no purpose for any stakeholders in the outcome of the issue. Moreover, the ethical justification purported to be at the heart of the decision is logically flawed and
Transplant Medicine The Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) contains over 128 functional genes. This is the densest part of the human genome and is responsible for most autoimmune diseases. This region also determines vaccine responsiveness, adverse drug reactions, disease progression and transplant rejection. The MHC genes are multigenic with a high degree of allelic polymorphism. There are over 7,500 different alleles and over 5,458 expressed MHC antigens currently known. (DeFranco, Locksley &
Organ Donation Why Organ Donating is a Social Responsibility Life is a sentence. It begins with a capital letter, has something in between, and then a punctuation mark at the end. Organ donation allows part of our physical body to be of use to someone else for short time after we have passed. It is a beautiful gift to be able to make someone else's life a little longer. This gives them
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