Human Organs Trade Essay Sample

Human Organs: Buying and Selling

We live in a world of business nowadays. People look for every kind of means to survive. Human organs have become one key thing in today’s market. As the demand for organs increases, there is a need to find more donors who are willing to donate or sale there organs. Interestingly, some organs are removed from the dead person who has just died immediately while organs such as the kidney can be removed from a living human being. Those who normally benefit from the organs removed from living beings are the most powerful people in the world that is from South to North, from poor to rich, from black and brown to white and from female to male. Some countries encourage such ideas of buying and selling of the human tissue.

For instance in Japan, rich Japanese who needed some transplant of organs used to send the so called “Body mafia” to go and look for the kidney donors in the other countries. They also traveled to Taiwan or Singapore to buy those organs that had been taken from the executed prisoners. This prisoners in some extend had not given the mandate for their organs to be sold or donated. However, this practice was banned later by the Japanese government after the World Medical Association reported that it was an abomination to take organs from dead prisoners.

China is the only country that has remained with the transplanting of the human organs from the executed prisoners and selling them at higher prices to the medical visitors from Hong Kong, Taiwan or Singapore hence increasing the number of prisoners to be executed including those found guilty of some small theft and cheating on their taxes (Scheper-Hughes, 1998). Some experts in China believe that the reason why China is targeting even the petty crimes is because they want to have more organs to put on sale hence enriching itself.

In India, the poor are the ones who normally sell one of their kidneys when they are still alive so as to pay their debts, to pay for the necessary surgery or meet their family needs. Others, especially the villagers sell their kidneys so that they can afford to pay the dowry for their daughters. Those who buy the kidneys come from rich countries such as Arabian Gulf. In 1997, the government tried to stop this kind of trade businesses announcing that it was illegal to do such as thing of selling of human organs but since then, the trade has gone underground and is performed by the crime gang hence the business increasing even more. Funny enough, there is also what we call organ theft. This is whereby a person is cheated that he or she needs a small operation but in the process of the operation one of the kidneys is removed instead.

The other place where kidneys are sold is Brazil even though people try to make it look like it the business is less commercial. All that is needed is the donors to pretend that they are relatives to the person buying the organ so as to make the doctor feel so comfortable when performing the operation. Like in India, Brazil has come up with a new law that will try to stop such kinds of trade in human organs even though these laws tend to be different with the Brazil one. In Brazil, it is not illegal to sell the organs especially when you are an adult and you’ve died, unless they have got a special identity card confirming that you are not a donor for the organs. However, what is meant here is that there will be many organs available for transplant and there is no need for one to buy one. This law has instigated reactions and debates from the public who claim that the greedy doctors and the health workers might take advantage of the new law concerning the selling and buying of the body organs (Adomaitis, 2011). To show their opposition to the law, most people have resolved to take the new identity cards to prove that they are not donors hence opposing the new law.

Finally in the United States, a project for selling human organs is about to be started by the American Medical Association (AMA). The AMA believes that the American people won’t donate their organs unless it was their family members or unless they are paid for the organ donation. What the AMA have in mind or expect is the American people to sign a contract while they are alive giving a promise that their organs can be transplanted immediately they die. Here, the person to receive the money after the organ donation has to be named by the donor incase his or her organ is transplanted even though most of the American doctors are not comfortable with such an idea.

Then we ask ourselves whether buying and selling of the human organs is ethical when it comes to the matter of life and death? The marketplace of selling and buying should be considerable in terms of the support needed in both the donor and the receiver instead of exploitation and this can be achieved by establishing a single purchaser system in the market place that is been confined. According to the UK statistics, in the Whole World, there are an estimated number of 700000 patients on dialysis while in India, it is estimated that there are 100000 new patients with kidney failures every year while in America, 3 million people have got problems with congestive heart failures and the number of deaths related to such conditions are estimated to be 250000 every year as 27000 patients die from liver disease every year. All this is caused by lack of enough matching tissues or fear of donors to donate the organs.

In the Western Europe, the number of patients who await for the kidneys is estimate do to be 40000 while only 10000 kidneys are reported to be available in that particular period hence leaving doubts on the number of people who die as they await for the organs to be found or donated. This has become a major crisis, challenge and also a major scandal.

In order to meet the legitimate ethical and regulatory concerns, any organ selling’s and buying  should be safeguarded against the wrongful exploitation by the rich or even medical doctors and they should show some concerns against the vulnerable and taking into account the considerations of justice and equity.

Where there is a market, Hypocrisy remains to be part and parcel of buying and selling of organs whereby each and every person (surgeons and medical) is paid apart from the donor who doesn’t benefit at all as the receiver of his or her kidney enjoys the fruits of receiving the organ and it is because of this reason that the ethical market in the live donors of the organs should be highly regulated

In conclusion, the buying and selling of the human body organs should not be looked as a new thing since most of the nations do approve the idea of trading while other nations, this kind of trading is illegal. the most affected and also do suffer a lot are the poor people who are at times forced to sell their tissues to the rich in order to get a living while others engage in crime to get such organs for the purposes of trading.