Legalise Organ Sales, Say Us Doctors

People should be allowed to sell their kidneys and other organs for transplantation in order to meet rising demand for donors, according to two US doctors.

A medical body should be set up to regulate the purchase of organs from live donors to curb the growing international black market, according to the paper in the journal Kidney International.

The paper, by Eli Friedman, a kidney specialist from the State University of New York, and Amy Friedman, a transplant specialist from Yale University, suggests "a fair market price" for a kidney would be about $40,000 (around £23,000). The authors said this would not only save lives but put black market traders and surgeons out of business.

They noted that Organs Watch, which monitors the illegal international trade in live organ donation, estimates that patients from rich nations, including the US and Japan, buy thousands of organs taken - often unscrupulously - from live donors from developing countries, such as Mexico and Pakistan, every year.

The doctors wrote: "Strategies to expand the donor pool - public relations campaigns - have been mainly unsuccessful. Although illegal in most nations, and viewed as unethical by professional medical organizations, the voluntary sale of purchased donor kidneys now accounts for thousands of black market transplants.

"The case for legalizing kidney purchases hinges on the key premise that individuals are entitled to control of their body parts even to the point of inducing risk of life. One approach to expanding the pool of kidney donors is to legalize payments of a fair market price of about $40,000 to donors."

The doctors suggested that while affluent patients could fund pay for donor organs, poorer individuals could get them through health insurance schemes such as Medicaid. They do not suggest how the market would operate in a free health service like the UK NHS.

About 400 people a year die in the UK because they are left waiting for a donor, despite the fact that 13m people are signed up to the register.

But UK doctors’ leaders said legalizing the sale of organs from live donors would lead to exploitation of the poor, both in this country and in the developing world.

A spokeswoman for the British Medical Association said it was opposed to payment for organs. She said: "There are doctors who support the idea of payment for live donors and we have no problem with the issue being debated. The association believes that the sale of organs would exploit vulnerable and desperate members of society who may feel compelled to sell their organs for money."