Kidney Donation

-1 When organ donations are discussed, many people may think of the tiny red heart they put on driver’s license declaring them a donor. People who are familiar with the organ donations know they occur postmortem. Unfortunately, even with approximately half the United States population choosing to donate organs, there is still a critical shortage of organs for transplant. Many views are held regarding the restrictions that should be placed on live organ donations, or if it should be legal at all. All across the country there is a great demand for organs, and not enough people willing to donate. With the understanding of the shortage there now needs to be a solution. Although Bruce Gottlieb’s “How much for that Kidney In the Window” and Gilbert Meilaender’s “Strip-Mining the Dead: When Human Organs are for Sale” both have a strong view about the selling of organs, Gottlieb offer’s a more logical viewpoint on the subject.
One solution may be to remove the ban on human body parts. The selling of organs has become a much disputed subject in society and there are several concerns regarding this matter. One concern with legalizing the sale of kidneys is that it will give an unfair advantage to the wealthy and exploit the poor and underprivileged. The problem here may be that the poor may feel the need to sell a kidney to pay for food, car payment, or rent whereas the rich or wealthier people may have no need to sell their kidney. This change would make people feel that offering money would exploit the poor while long-term benefits would go only to the wealthy. There is no solution to poverty, but taking away people’s opportunities economically is not the way to solve the problem, argues Bruce Gottlieb (505). Why does the government get to decide what we spend our money on? Or what we get to sell? Supporting legalization of kidney sales is based upon autonomy, which is personal interdependence to make moral decisions and to act on them. In other words, supporters feel...