Friday, March 12

Old testimony found at Harpers:
From testimony given in June 2001 by Wang Guoqi, formerly a doctor at a Chinese People's Liberation Army hospital, to the Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights of the U.S. House of Representatives. China has executed more than 5,000 people in the last year, more than all other countries combined, often for crimes such as tax evasion. Organs are routinely harvested from executed prisoners, and revenues from transplants are estimated to earn Chinese hospitals tens of millions of dollars annually.
Dr. Wang has applied for political asylum in the United States, and currently works as a sushi chef in New Jersey. There's a joke there. Here's the nasty part:
At the site, the execution commander gave the order, "Go!" and the prisoner was shot to the ground. Either because the executioner was nervous, aimed poorly, or intentionally misfired to keep the organs intact, the prisoner had not yet died but instead lay convulsing on the ground. We were ordered to take him to the ambulance anyway, where urologists extracted his kidneys quickly and precisely. When they finished, the prisoner was still breathing and his heart continued to beat. The execution commander asked if they might fire a second shot to finish him off, to which the county court staff replied, "Save that shot. With both kidneys out, there is no way he can survive."
OK, so we see the potential abuses of paying organ donors. MICHAEL FINKEL wrote This Little Kidney Went to Market for the NYTimes, also showing the dark side.

The Indiana University Center for Bioethics has an extensive Annotative Bibliography on organ donation (don't they mean annotated?), which includes the following:

Cherry, Mark J. (August 2000). "The body for charity, profit and holiness: Commerce in human body parts." Christian Bioethics. 6(2):127-138. This article uses Christian analysis to reveal, oral arguments and theological concerns which incline strongly in support of the creation of a for-profit market in human organs. The author says that current nationalized bureaucratic procedures for organ procurement and allocation do not appreciate the Christian body as the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit.

Shannon, Thomas A. "The kindness of strangers: Organ transplantation in a capitalist age" Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 2001 September; 11(3): 285-303. The paper examines how and in what ways the possible Commodification of organs will affect our society and the impacts this may have on the supply of organs. The author feels that it would be a tragedy if we tried to solve the problem of organ shortage by commodification rather than by the kindness of strangers who meet in community and recognize and meet the demands of others in generosity.

Cohen, Cynthia "Public policy and the sale of human organs" Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 2002 March; 12(1): 47-64. The author concludes that protecting the dignity of persons and their bodies and supporting our sense of altruism and interconnection with one another overcomes the importance of individual choice and a faith in the power of money as an incentive with respect to the provision of organs for transplant. Selling organs diminish the respect for persons and the interconnected as human beings.

Cherry, Mark J. "Is a Market in Human Organs Necessarily Exploitative?" Public-Affairs-Quarterly. O 00; 14(4): 337-360. The author argues that if there are not independent moral grounds to show that the sale of organs is immoral, then the purchase of organs from the poor will be exploitative if and only if either such independent grounds of impropriety can be established or the policy on balance will cause more harm than benefit for the poor. Assessing the latter condition will require recognizing that allowing the poor to choose on their own view of the good both protects the poor from being demeaned by being considered unable to make moral choices about their own future and helps to educate individuals in their faculties of free and responsible choice.

Ross, Lainie Friedman "Solid organ donation between strangers" Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2002 Fall; 30(3): 440-445 19.5; 19.6; 2.1. The author argues that organ donation by altruistic strangers represent a morally legitimate expansion of the living organ pool. But before such donations are widely embraced, protocols should be developed that are ethically sound with respect to procurement and allocation.

It sounds to me like Mark Cherry and Lainie Friedman Ross in the last two know what their talking about.

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