Spare parts for sale

People should be allowed to sell their kidneys for £28,000 in an NHS-regulated organ market Dr Sue Rabbitt Roff, of Dundee University said in an article published online today by the British Medical Journal. She called on the health service to offer financial rewards to individuals willing to give up a kidney as a means of speeding up the rate of transplants and reducing the cost of treatments and dialysis to the NHS.

Dr Roff, a senior research fellow at Dundee’s department of medical sociology explained “We already allow strangers to donate kidneys out of the goodness of their hearts. They get their costs covered, they don’t know who the recipient is, there’s no publicity, no public acknowledgement of what they do. We’ve moved away from the notion it has to be a family member or a close associate who can give you a kidney. We’ve already moved into the zone of allowing the general public to make good-hearted donations. What I’m suggesting is, why don’t we add money to this equation in order to increase the amount of provision which is there...I came to this figure of £28,000 because that’s the average national income in Britain at the moment, so it seems a fair price across all the social strata..."

The British Medical Association said it would not support money being offered in exchange for kidneys.

Dr Calum McKellar, director of the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics said: “A legal, regulated market in human body parts would end up exploiting those who have very restrictive financial means, such as many students and foreigners.”

There are currently 725 people in Scotland waiting for a new kidney but the number coming up for transplant has plateaued at around 200 in recent years. How much smaller would be the number if those in various industries (chemicals, oil, tobacco, pharmaceuticals etc) had not poisoned and polluted our bodies for profit for decades?

Everything inside capitalism takes the form of a commodity, everything has its price, so it doesn't come as a surprise to Socialist Courier to read Dr. Roff's proposal.