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Great Singapore Organ Sale?

L

landandsea

Guest
"Let’s push within the current regime… but at the same time, let’s not write off an idea just because it sounds radical or controversial… We may be able to find a compromise which is workable and yet does not offend people’s sensibilities."
(Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan, as quoted in The Straits Times, dated 21 July 2008, page H1)

While pondering on this quotation, I cannot help but to be skeptical. The minister’s concern is over the people’s sensibilities, but the alarming fundamental issue of this thorny matter concerns people’s lives rather than mere sensibilities.

And here I have in view the paid organ donor’s life. Yet by no means I take the buyers’ life as less valuable. In fact it is precisely because both lives of the buyer and donor are as significance that the misery of the former should not be inflicted in any degree on the latter even though the latter willing to accept financial compensation.

Obviously, in the organ trade, the term “organ donor” is an oxymoron for in a trade there is no compensation but payment, and there is no donor but simply owner. The relationship does not bear any altruistic meaning but pure commercial transaction.

In an article titled ‘S’pore can take lead in legalising organ trade’ written by Jennifer Yeo and Madan Mohan, published in the 17 July 2008 issue of The Straits Times, contained a propounding view that organ trade is a “social relationship… which gives a new lease of life to both the stakeholders”. With such a view, the authors concede that the “law ought not to step in to criminalise and punish such relationships.”

The authors argue that given the “unclear” legal status of the human body, the treatment of our body is, therefore, accorded to and guaranteed by mutual consent.

The authors even compare prostitution among others with organ trading. This betrays the heightened commercial view that they have on humanity. In other words, they are saying that we can buy and sell our body (or parts of it) because we do not know who we are.

Here their careless hastiness betrays the prematurity of their judgment and suggestion. First and foremost, humanity as a whole is not a negotiation by any one or other group of humans. We learned that through our experience with the Nazi regime.

The authors’ failure to recognize the status of the human body is not at all a contribution to the discussion of how should we treat our body, which is the underlying concern of organ trading. At best, their ignorance of the value and status of the human body can only be like a ‘stop’ sign which supposedly to alert us to the complexity of the matter and hence preventing any unnecessary, harmful, and hasty decision. Yet they ventured over their legitimate course.

The fact is that Jennifer Yeo and Madan Mohan’s premature contention for the legalisation of organ trade impels further commercialisation of the human body. And this is precisely the very exploitation that they wanted to avoid.

Probably their hastiness is due to their concern for the victims of organ failure. They wrote, “While altruists say that any sale of organs is unethical…we need to put ourselves in the shoes of the patient waiting desperately for an organ.” On this point, I have to question their preference for casting care on the victims of organ failure. Why should we put ourselves only in the shoes of the patient and not in those of the organ owner as well?

In a study conducted by World Health Organization, 78% of Egyptians who sold their organ experience health deterioration, 78% spent the money within 5 months, and 73% reported weakened ability to perform labour-intensive jobs. In India, 86% reported deterioration in their health, decline in average family income, 96% of those who sold their kidneys is to pay-off debts, and 75% were still in debt. 58% in Iran report health deterioration, 60% report negative effects on their physical activities, and 65% reported negative effects on their employment status. So, it is reasonably to conclude that a normal person will not sell his or her organ. And those who give their organs into trade do it out of predicament.

Given the fact that virtually all organ owners trade their organ out of poverty, organ buyers should not be like an opportunist who takes advantage of the owners by harvesting their body parts through financial means in their crisis. Unfortunately they are. And often they did it under the cover of ‘selflessness’ in a way that seems as though they are doing the poor a favour.

Is that the best the rich can do to help the poor; by buying their organs? The article suggests exactly that though under disguise: “If the State… cannot help the poor in overcoming their problems, it ought not to raise more barriers for them [by preventing them to sell their organs to the rich by law].”

It is easy to see through the masqueraded hypocritical ‘help-the-poor’ rhetoric in the quoted passage. Just ask yourself, “Why do the State suddenly being charged as raising “more barriers” in preventing the rich from helping the poor only when the rich is in need of the body parts of the poor?” Why the rich cannot help the poor when they do not need the body parts of the latter?

The obvious answer is that this is not a case that “someone wanting to help the other who is in crisis”, but “someone who wants to get something out of the other when the other is in crisis”. Such is not merely an exploitation of other humans but also the discrimination of those who are at the lower part of the socio-economic level.

Of course the attraction in legalising organ trade is the extension of widespread commercialisation over all sphere of reality. And this is exactly what the rich wants because the more commercialised the world is, the more powerful they become. Perhaps there are many other reasons for us to see human body parts being one of the marketable fascinations in the next Great Singapore Sales, but our ignorance of the status and value of the human body is definitely not one of them.
 
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