Should we legalize the sale of
Alternatively, the BMA has advocated radical revision of the inefficient system by which patients are matched to donors. However, the population supplying the organs is nothing like the people receiving them. Neither would a surgeon be prepared to conduct such an operation.
Putting a price on the human body only invites exploitation by the unscrupulous. As the supply and demand gap widen, more lives are being lost at an ever increasing cost. Thousands of lives would be saved.
If it is done safely, the donor will not suffer.
Once again, humanitarianism is best served by the respect for civil liberty, and yet we are deprived both, with horribly unfortunate consequences, just to maintain the pretense of state-enforced propriety.
Although not every black market transaction is exploitative -- demonstrating that organ sales, in and of themselves, are not the problem -- the most unsavory parts of the trade can be attributed to the fact that it is illegal.
Organs are your bodily property and government should not use poorly managed bureaucracies to allocate the supply of organs. For each successful kidney transplant operation, valuable hours on a dialysis machine will be left vacant.
The truly decent route would be to allow people to withhold or give their organs freely, especially upon death, even if in exchange for money.