This Christmas season, buy the gift that keeps giving: an organ.
Unfortunately you can't. Almost every country in the world prohibits the sale of transplant organs.
Early this month, police in South Africa and Brazil arrested people who ran voluntary organ markets where mostly poor individuals sold their kidneys for around $10,000. No small pittance. Even the police noted that the poor could "probably buy a house or a small business with that money."
This just doesn't make sense. In the United States, there are around 83,000 people who are in need of kidney transplants. Yet while women can sell their eggs and men can sell their sperm, we will not permit the creation of an incentive for potential organ suppliers. If a procedure involves a serious inconvenience and entails some health risks, all the more reason we should pay people for the trouble.
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