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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ellameena |
| 2008-01-30 13:22 (UTC) |
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Organ sales: there are a couple of arguments. The one you've probably heard that is not compelling to you (although I do find it compelling myself) is the ethical argument that once money changes hands, there is a loss of free will. A friend of mine was just telling me that there are whole villages in Africa (or was it India) where everybody only has one kidney. I find it distasteful that the rich should be preying upon the poor that way.
The other argument is that the fact is that when you pay people for organs or blood, they tend to "forget" inconvenient details such as their HIV status or other important medical information that the recipient really needs to know. The more money, the more amnesia. Thus, it is well established that the only way to have a safe supply of organs is to prohibit payment.
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| jaylake |
| 2008-01-30 13:31 (UTC) |
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the ethical argument that once money changes hands, there is a loss of free will
Right. Which I find a somewhat bizarre argument given that our society tends to fetishize the free market.
they tend to "forget" inconvenient details such as their HIV status or other important medical information
Haven't run into that one before. It makes sense to some degree, but even blood donation has to deal with this problem. ($15 for plasma is a lot of money to a street drunk.) I should think that this situation can be addressed with appropriate processes in place.
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| ellameena |
| 2008-01-30 13:43 (UTC) |
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No, not really. It's been tried. You can't 100% rely on testing when it comes to the blood supply. It's really important to get an accurate history from the donor. If you've donated blood before, you're familiar with that history, which includes a check box asking them to throw away your blood after you've made a show of donating it. Many blood borne diseases are undetectable in the early stages, so if you are being paid for your blood (or an organ) then it becomes very easy to deny that you have a cold, or that you have recently visited a foreign country, etc. Besides, haven't you heard that you can get zombie virus from donated organs? *shudder*
As to the other, our society may fetishize the free market, but I don't. Once the option exists to sell an organ, especially for a huge sum of cash, many desperate people will have no choice but to do so. And donating an organ is really risky. There is always a risk of death from the anaesthesia, and there are also serious complications you can suffer from the donation. I don't want to see people trading their organs for, say, needed health care for their child, or to save their home from foreclosure or something. Yuck.
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What I see as more likely (and more chilling) would be the prospect of parents having children in order to sell their organs.
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| ellameena |
| 2008-01-30 14:13 (UTC) |
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Yikes! Scary, but I can imagine it.
Reproduction is an area where the ethical wrinkles and rich/poor exploitation issues have not been ironed out. Currently, young women who donate eggs are paid quite a large sum of money in the U.S., even though the procedure is risky, involves general anaesthesia, and requires huge doses of cancer-causing chemicals. It's much too close to A Handmaid's Tale for my comfort. Even worse, there's a regular industry in India for women hired to be surrogates, and they apparently have no rights whatsoever over their own bodies during the process.
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| goulo |
| 2008-01-30 15:08 (UTC) |
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"a check box asking them to throw away your blood after you've made a show of donating it."
WTF? You sit down and get blood taken like any other donor, except you and the blood collector both know that your blood is useless and should be discreetly thrown away later? Is this so people can impress their friends by pretending to be blood donors when they can't really donate blood? Or what? I never heard of this. On the face of it, it sounds rather crazy and wasteful to officially have such a charade as part of the process.
(I haven't donated blood in a very long time due to being automatically disqualified.)
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| ellameena |
| 2008-01-30 15:12 (UTC) |
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I haven't donated blood since about 1989, so they may have changed the procedure. But, yes, my understanding is that it's because you can feel pressure from coworkers, etc. to participate in a blood drive, and don't want them to know that you may be at risk for HIV or some other blood borne disease. I don't think the person drawing the blood knows this, but someone in "the back room" takes care of it. Kind of pathetic, isn't it? But it makes sense when you think about it. Some of those organizational blood drives can really put you on the spot.
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| kadath |
| 2008-01-30 15:32 (UTC) |
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| International League of Pedants |
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They now do it with a barcode. The tech gives you a sheet with two stickers on it, one that's labeled "use my blood" and one that's labeled "don't use my blood," but the stickers themselves are just barcodes. The tech turns away, and you stick the one you want in a square on your paperwork, and the other one on scrap paper.
I think another reason they let you do it anonymously like that is that some people may genuinely not know about some of the restrictions, like ever having had sex with a man who's had sex with a man since 1977, and when sitting there with the interviewer, may not want to admit to something they think is embarrassing.
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I don't think the free will argument is as compelling as is the element of exploitation of the poor by the rich when it comes to paying poor people to sell their organs. Putting it into the catagory of free will lessens the impact of the argument, in my opinion--what is happening here is the exploitation of the poor by the rich, and it needs to be called just that--exploitation, the use of more resources, and flat-out greed by the rich. Free will, to me, just glosses over the responsibility of the rich for the exploitation of the poor. It's a social justice issue, and to me exploiting the poor for their organs is exploitation, pure and simple. I don't want to make it a free will issue because then it seems to me that the onus gets put on the poor--convoluted thought on my part, but I think ethically this is an issue of exploitation and unfair use of resources by the rich.
As for safety of the organs or blood, I've known people in the transplant business. Procedures are in place to assess the presence of HIV, Hep C and other nasties, and have been for years, since HIV became prevalent. Now it's possible that those self-same exploitative rich preying on the poor may bypass those protections, especially if they're obtaining organs in the Third World and getting their surgery done there--but again, I don't think that transplantation without checking for the safety of the organs is happening, except amongst a very few.
(Hmm. Story idea simmering here)
To me, the biggest argument against organ sales is the exploitation issue. SF has addressed this issue in several ways, the most chilling (to me) being Cordwainer Smith's "A Planet Named Shayol," which I find much more scary than Larry Niven's Gil the ARM stories.
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| ellameena |
| 2008-01-30 14:10 (UTC) |
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You make an interesting distinction between abridgement of free will and exploitation. I'll have to ponder it. I'm against both, obviously.
Biomarkers and laboratory tests are an area of special expertise of mine. The unfortunate truth is that there is a significant rate of false negative in many, if not all, of the tests for major blood borne pathogens. In many cases, just one virus particle can be infectious--this is certainly the case for HIV. There is no way to detect a single virus particle in a pint of blood. That's why, as I said above, the history given by the donor is absolutely critical, and studies have been done looking at this, as well, so it's not hypothetical. I wish we had fool proof ways of ensuring the safety of donated blood or organs, but many of the lab tests that we rely on are barely 70% accurate.
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| (Anonymous) |
| 2008-01-30 13:26 (UTC) |
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Pastor Brewster froze the heart of that potato bearing Jesus.
Why does this sound like the start of a Ken Scholes story?
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Thanks for the Kansas history link. My family came to the Northwest from Missouri but I've heard bits and pieces of the family story (mother's side, we were here in 1849, I'm fifth generation Oregonian).
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| jess_ka |
| 2008-01-30 15:41 (UTC) |
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Florida Couple Find Jesus in a Potato
Well, I guess it's good to be pleased by simple things.
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I'm fascinated by the amazing number of links you manage to come up with.
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| biomekanic |
| 2008-01-30 21:59 (UTC) |
| Re: A link to toss into the salad |
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I consider it fortunate that I learned many years ago to suppress my loud laughter while at work.
Happy employees after = non working employees.
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| tempested_bird |
| 2008-01-31 00:46 (UTC) |
| Re: A link to toss into the salad |
| Cthulu Ranger |
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Oh, indeed. I'm lucky that I work in environments where laughing = good. But yeah, it comes in handy in the office world, the land that fun forgot.
I laughed for a good 30 minutes while reading those.
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re Biggles:
The farmer has my sympathy. When the PA National Air Guard did their training exercises the barn on the hill across the road from us ( wow, if ever there was a PA Dutch structured sentence... ) was a prime bombing target. We also used to get transports flying up the creek valley at low levels.
South Central PA looks a lot like the East German/Polish border from what I understand, making it a fairly good mock up for that NATO/Warsaw Pact showdown.
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