The Ethics of Organ Transplants

“Marx wrote about the “fetishism of commodities,” whereby items come to be thought of as having inherent value, as they might have weight or color. The commodity – the object – is decontextualized in a capitalist system, and consumers know little or nothing about the social relations of production or of exchange. As Harvey puts it, “the grapes that sit upon the supermarket shelves are mute, we cannot see the fingerprints of exploitation upon them or tell immediately what part of the world they are from.” (Pg. 48-49).

Context of Excerpt

Margaret Lock discusses the commodification of human body parts and how it complicates the seemingly altruistic world of saving lives through organ donation. She argues that as globalization becomes more common, society must consider more than local values or regulations in determining things such as whether a commodity is ethically obtained or not. There are often so many intermediaries involve that it is too complex to determine a commodities origin, which leaves the door wide open for the exploitation of the poor in developing countries. Human bodies have been historically commodified as slaves or sex laborers, but up until the twentieth century an individual’s body parts had no intrinsic value to anybody but their owner’s. Lock then goes on to discuss that in the United States, body parts can be legally constituted as separate from the person, opening the door for their commodification.

In the excerpt I chose, Marx takes it one step further and points out the dilemma that commodification in general poses, which is that we have no way of knowing whether or not the products we buy were obtained ethically. This becomes an even greater dilemma than, say, that of whether or not your coffee is from workers getting paid a living wage, because in the case of body organ commodification, people’s very lives are at risk.

Doctors Study the Ethics of Transplant Tourism by Dave Parks

http://www.nola.com/living/t-p/index.ssf?/base//living-11/1217742163244430.xml&coll=1

The article by Dave Parks also discusses the moral dilemma involved with the commodification of organs in respect to the global market. Many people are desperately ill and waiting for organ transplants that could save or extend their lives significantly. More and more, a trend is rising in which patients turn to transplant tourism, in which they travel to another part of the world where they can buy an organ, most commonly a kidney. Estimates state the between five and ten percent of organ transplants worldwide are conducted this way. Policy change in India and China has resulted in a serious reduction in the amount of foreign organ transplants in those countries, but Pakistan and the Philippines have now become leading exporters of kidneys.

This is where the ethics comes into play. Logically speaking, you can sell your own property, you can sell your labor, and if you take that one step further, why should you not be able to sell your body parts. The idea is typically that someone in desperate need of money should be able to make an altruistic sacrifice of one of their body parts, usually a kidney, save somebody’s life, and then significantly improve their own life by buying their citizenship or getting themselves out of debt. The problem that Parks points out is that this is not the case. Most of the money from these organ sales ends up going to the middle men who make the deals, and the lives of the people donating the organ are rarely improved. On the contrary, in many cases the organ donor is not provided with proper follow up care and could even die. In China, before serious policy reform it was thought that many organs were coerced out of prisoners.

Even in the U.S., Parks writes, it is debatable whether or not Organ donors are ethically treated. The sale of organs within the U.S. has been outlawed. The result is that the patients get the organs they need, doctors and hospitals get paid, but organ donors and their families get not compensation, not even insurance coverage for health problems they may have years later because of the surgery.

It is thought that if more people within their own country would agree to be organ donors, the illegal trafficking of organs would decline if not disappear entirely. Regardless, the problem of human body parts becoming commodified will still exists and as long as it still exists, there is always the possibility that the system will be abused and that people will be taken advantage of. Only as I said before, this is more serious than people simply getting fair compensation, peoples very lives are at risk. As long as there is the chance that people could die because of a decision to get an organ transplant, the ethics involved are questionable at best and sinister at worst.

(Image courtesy www.inkcinct.com.au)

Text Quote from Twice Dead, Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death by Margaret Lock (c) 2002 by the Regents of the University of California.