Even though there are 3,400 Canadians waiting for a kidney transplant and nowhere near enough organs to go around, Canada should not change the law to allow payment to kidney donors, says one medical ethicist. Researchers at the Canadian Organ Replacement Registry (CORR) say new strategies are needed to meet the need and perhaps payment should be considered.
Paying living kidney donors $10,000 “would be less costly and more effective than the current organ donation system,” according to a CORR study. Researchers assume that would increase the number of transplants performed by 5 per cent or more.
“I’m very much against it,” says Margaret Somerville, founding director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University in Montreal. “This goes to some of our most important values and principles and norms and shared beliefs.”
Selling organs corrupts values–ethicist
The selling of organs corrupts the values that the giving of those organs represent in our community, according to Michael Sandel, a political philosopher at Harvard who wrote the book “What Money Can’t Buy.” Somerville agrees with his thesis.
“Among those values would be that the body is not for sale. It’s something beyond the market. Altruism is important, that when we’re talking about a serious threat to someone’s health or life, we do what we can to help those people. And to turn everything in your community into a marketable commodity is to lose the very important values that…that make us a Canadian community.”
The poor sell organs, the wealthy buy them
We know that poor people or those who are desperate for money are the ones who give organs, Somerville points out, and it is the wealthy who can buy them. That would be true in a private arrangement. It could be argued that those problems could be overcome in a closely-regulated public system she says, but that would not solve the issue of what that could do to common values.
“I think that selling bits of yourself is wrong for the person,” says Somerville, “…it’s wrong for our whole values system and the values which we share and on which we base our society.
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