The Commodification of Human Organs - Essay Example

In short, these programmes have failed to make more organs available for transplantation. They are just unable to meet the requirements of the patients' needs for donated organs. On the face of this dearth of available organs that could have saved or qualitatively enhanced suffering human life, a more sympathetic attitude has long been entertained to create proposals for alternative procurement of organs. This includes provision of compensation to the organ donors. However, this has become an open secret in practice since there is an ongoing debate about the ethical pros and cons of this phenomenon and there are rigorous ethical norms exercised by the authority in this matter.

The healthcare professionals who are involved in this area are actually in a dilemma, following ethics strictly leads almost to no practice, and hiding the truth is unethical. This work deals with this dilemma, and tries to critically examine this issue from this author's perspective. In the latter half of the 20th century, the possibility of transplanting organs became real. New advances in immunology and understanding of the mechanism of organ transplantation lead to development of new technologies for transplantation and support for the transplanted organ that, otherwise, would have been rejected by the recipient.

Meanwhile, the medical profession accepted the concept of brain death that indicated a point at which death of an individual might officially be declared. Since organ transplantation has become feasible, many ethical issues and questions have arisen. The most important of them was the propriety of arbitrarily redefining death so as to make organ retrieval more easily possible. Gradually, as the science and technique advanced, more and more questions grounded on ethics started coming up. The history also indicates a future (Baker LR., 2000). The rate science is advancing, in the near future, the dream of growing organs from stem cells may materialize.

In that case, naturally, the ethical issues encircling transplanting organs from newly dead or from living donors may become irrelevant. Regrettably, this is not the case at present. Ethical rigorousness in preventing financial exchanges around an available organ may, therefore, lead to a situation where some critically ill patients in need of an organ transplant would meet certain, agonizing, and perhaps unnecessary death (Dworkin R., 1993). At this point in time, some of the earlier ethical objections and quandaries, such as, whether organ or tissue donation is ethically permissible in the first place or whether selections made by groups of people were legitimate option, have become irrelevant largely, either because finding, advancement in science, or public consensus has resolved them.

Despite this, some very critical ones remain still. These are not around the substantive question of the probity of transplantation in the first place. Ethics have accepted the legitimacy of transplantation very much, and now the probe is on the issues of allocation. In fact, among the most important of the issues that is to be dealt with in relation to the ethics of organ transplantation are the questions dealing with the mode, process, or rules of organ allocation, not to individual patients per se but allocation to centres which in turn allocate to individuals (English, V.

and Sommerville, A., 2003).Death