Imagine that you’re in one of your classes and you start to feel your body ache, so you take some Advil and hope for the best. A few days later you’re home with what you think is the flu that’s been spreading around; you’ve already missed three consecutive days of class, so you decide to visit the doctor. After your checkup you seem to be getting worse, the prescription the doctor gave you doesn’t seem to be working. You’re body aches, especially your lower back, and you start to see blood in your urine. Freaking out, you rush to the emergency room where you wait for hours to be seen. Once you are seen and tests have been run, you find out that your kidneys are failing. Your only choice now is to get onto a transplant waiting list behind 70,000 people and go on dialysis while waiting your turn.
The truth is, only 17,000 of those 70,000 people will get kidney transplants this year, according to the American Kidney Fund. But, if it was legal for people to sell their kidneys many of the people who couldn’t get them before would be able to survive. The fact that over 80,000 people die from kidney failure each year is devastating. So, if you were dying and were willing to do or spend any amount of money to save your life wouldn’t you want to have the right to? Making the selling of human organs illegal is a violation of our rights, we should have the option to save ourselves instead of waiting on others to die in order for us to live. More people need to stand up for those who are on their death beds; no person should have to go through painful dialysis just to keep themselves alive. Letters should be written, the word should be spread; this law cannot be maintained because you or someone that you love could be the next victim.
The vision of this problem came to me after watching Law & Order SVU; there had been a “murder” and the victim’s organs had been removed. After some investigation the detectives came to the conclusion that the organs had been sold. A father had bought the kidney for his dying seven year old son, but because the police bombarded the hospital before the surgery had begun the kidney was confiscated. The organization that controlled the kidneys for transplants would not accept it because it had been bought and it was against their code of “ethics.” This little boy could have been saved, or the person next on the waiting list, but instead a perfectly good kidney was wasted because of this law. You may think that people would then be murdered to sell their organs; but people are murdered for money everyday, is that going to stop you from carrying a purse or wallet? The complications that are caused by illegal kidney removal surgeries would cause more death than the murders that would be caused by the legalization of selling kidneys.
So, it comes down to your own perspective on the topic, is it something that you should stand up for or not? Will this just give the rich more opportunities than the poor to live? This is just one of the obstacles that would need to be solved from legalizing the purchase of kidneys. But you must remember that standing up for what is right is the framework of how we should all be living our lives. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” “One may well ask, ‘How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?’ The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just and there are unjust laws” (King 371). Unjust laws like this restraint on selling/purchasing kidneys should be fought. People are suffering and dying everyday when they could be saved.
How would you feel if you had no way out, knowing that you will die if your name doesn’t move up that waiting list soon? This is exactly how those people on the transplant waiting list are feeling. So, ask yourself, what would Martin Luther King Jr. do? He would stand up for what is right and do his best to make the needed changes. But, Dr. King is not available to solve this current problem, we are. We are the future and we have this opportunity to be heroes, to stand up for what we believe in, and to stand together to make change.
Works Cited
King Jr., Martin Luther. “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” 75 Readings Across the Curriculum an Anthology. Ed. Chris Anson. New York: MicGraw-Hill Inc., 2008. 366-383.
The American Kidney Fund.
PS... you should google "kidneys for sale" there are some really interesting articles!!!!
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