Should selling organs be legitimate?

It is somewhat worrying that neurologist Lee Wei Ling thinks that it is a good thing if people were allowed to sell their body parts. It makes me somewhat relieved that she is a doctor rather than a politician.

On 18 January 2007, The Straits Times reported that a straw poll on its interactive website indicated that the number who voted for and against the sale of organs is about equal. Sometimes my country is so utilitarian that it scares the bejibbers out of me.

I am against the sale of human body parts. The donation of body parts should only be done with altruistic motivation, not monetary. By putting a price on an organ, it creates a market for human organs.

A market! Gracious me. Do you know what a market for human organs means? It means that the rich will get a disproportionately larger share of body parts, the way the rich gets a disproportionately larger share of everything else that you can buy with money.

A poor family struggling with their day-to-day finances will be sorely tempted to sell a kidney, or a liver, or an eye to make ends meet. True, the rich man will live because of that poor man’s kidney, but at what expense?

When I was in the US, a quiet, reserved guy I played guitar with donated his kidney to another church member. He wasn't related to him or anything, he just did it out of Christian love. After they took out his kidney, he lost his appetite and so lost weight. It was a while before he regained his fitness. He's a hero.

When I was younger, Jamie Oliver and I were tempted to donate our eggs for a bit of hard cash. We weren’t doing anything with them anyway—not that I’m doing anything with mine right now—but the internet sites looked a little too dodgy. So we passed. I guess we weren't desperate enough.

Poor people take risks all the time with their health—some become prostitutes, some smuggle drugs into countries with capital punishment, most eat cheaply and poorly—but that is somehow different from selling parts of your body.

People don’t get paid for giving blood for the same reason. If there was money involved, people in the high-risk category may be more motivated to try to cheat and beat the system for a few extra dollars in the pocket.

I don’t know if it is possible to create a system that eliminates the ethical issues this raises. It may be possible, but I haven't seen it yet. I realize that you get very desperate when your own organ has failed. All of us will be willing to pay any price for a functioning one in such a situation. But sometimes money isn't everything.