Q/ SHOULD INDIVDUALS BE PERMITTED TO SELL THEIR KIDNEYS - Essay Example

The risk benefit factor seems contradictory, but the ethical considerations are every bit as conflicting. There is a legal precedent for the right to privacy and the right to self-determination for our own body. There is likewise a legal precedent that allows intrusive government intervention when it involves a human body and a medical procedure. Ethical considerations work to protect the poor, uneducated, and disadvantaged from being exploited, but still prohibit the act when viewed as goodwill in the attempt to save a life.

Sorting out the rationale and status of selling a kidney in todays marketplace is like trying to solve the riddle that is wrapped in an enigma and cloaked in a mystery. The more we make sense of it, the less sense it begins to make. The traditional carte blanch prohibition on the sale of kidneys needs to be re-evaluated in light of todays greater social awareness, improved medical procedures, and misplaced moral considerations. The prohibition on the sale of human organs has evolved as the technology necessary to accomplish the transplants became more widespread in the 1960s.

Initially, a person or the family could make deceased donor organs available for transplant, though it was often unclear whether the permission needed to be granted by the donor before death, or by the family after death. In 1968, the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act (UAGA) authorized the prior permission of the deceased or permission from the family if no prior permission had been granted. However, the UAGA did not address the sale of organs, and left it to the states to settle the question of financial remuneration.

At that time, the chair of the UAGA drafting committee warned that "It is possible, of course, that abuses may occur if payment could customarily be demanded, but every payment is not necessarily unethical" (Childress & Liverman 2006, p.230). This