Comparative Analysis of Organ Selling to Prevent Organ Trafficking

Comparative Analysis of Organ Selling to Prevent Organ Trafficking
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Does Legalizing Organ Sale Prevent Organ Trafficking?
The demand for organ transplant grows faster every year than the accumulated supply from organ donors. In the United States alone, about 116, 000 patients were in the waiting list in 2012, but only about 28,000 organ transplants were performed and about 6,508 patients died while waiting for a donor (Razdan, Degenholtz, Khan, and Driessen, 2015). This problem lead to the rise of illegal trading of organs where an illegal crime group targets the exploitation of individuals whom are desperate enough to trade their organs for financial compensation through an underground market of organ. Many confirmed cases that were accounted for illegal organ trade includes underprivileged men, women and children (Bagheri, 2015). There are also reports of kidnapping of adults and children to extract their organs (Kishore, 2005). According to the World Heath Organization analytics, it is estimated that about 660,000 people around t he world requires a certain kind of organ transplant where only 10% of these receive the transplant per year; however, 10% of these transplant recipients receive their organs from trafficked organ donors (Major, 2008). It goes to show that the current donation programs and current laws against organ trafficking fail to provide the needed results to combat these issues (Avci, 2018). Although there is an increased international effort in developing laws and policies to solve these issues, there are countries that seek to legalize organ sale to prevent illegal organ harvesting and trafficking by regulating organ trade.
One of the countries that legalized the sale of organs is Iran. In 1988, Iran compensated the donors for their organs as funded by their government (Ghods & Savaj, 2006). In a study by Major (2008), Iran created a third party organization where the donors and recipient will establish contact to carry out the proper contract arrangement between the two parties. Other than the compensation given by the government, the recipient will also provide the donor with free heath care insurance and other payments usually as a form of charity. The Iranian government reiterated the prevention of organ trafficking since they do not allow any form of any “middleman” to receive payment and negotiate with anyone in the waiting list other than those medical professionals endorsed by the government. Enen those so called, “transplant tourist”, foreigners who travel to Iran to exploit the organs of Iranian donors, are outlawed by the Iranian government.
Added by Major (2008), the first year of implementing the legalization of organ sale doubled the number of organ donors in their country. The government’s advocacy in pushing through the legalization of organ sale argued that the people have every right to every aspect of their own body, and this gives the right to any individual to donate their body part to anyone they wanted to. Other than that, Major (2008) emphasized Iran’s plan on ending organ trafficking since the legal buying of organs removes the need for a “middleman” to create an unregulated traffic...