Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives by Michael A. Heller & James Salzman

Author:Michael A. Heller & James Salzman [Heller, Michael A. & Salzman, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385544726
Google: SMKWzQEACAAJ
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

OUR BODIES, NOT OUR SELVES

The Robin Hood of Kidneys

For decades, Levy Rosenbaum ran a life-saving business. People dying of kidney failure came to him for help. He found willing donors and matched them up—for a price. “So far, I’ve never had a failure. I’m doing this a long time,” he said.

Rosenbaum’s services did not come cheap. He charged recipients as much as $160,000, of which perhaps $10,000 went to the living kidney donor and the rest to doctors, visa preparers—and his profit. He explains, “One of the reasons it’s so expensive is because you have to schmear [bribe] all the time.” It’s also expensive because this business has been illegal since 1984, when America criminalized the live organ trade.

In 2009 Rosenbaum was caught in an FBI sting, pleaded guilty, and became the first—and so far, only—person convicted in America for selling living human organs. At his sentencing hearing, the courtroom was packed. The kidney broker was swarmed, but not by outraged victims. Well-wishers came to plead for leniency. One said, “There are no victims here. The donors are happy and the recipients are happy.” Rosenbaum called himself “the Robin Hood of kidney transplants.”

The government prosecutors argued, “There is only one thing that his story has in common with Robin Hood, and that is, it is fiction.” Rosenbaum coached “donors” to lie to their transplant doctors and pretend they were making compassionate gifts. He carried a gun as he made millions brokering deals, sometimes threatening donors if they tried to back out. He ended up spending two and a half years in jail.

Prosecutors argued that jailing him put people on notice that selling kidneys is “an affront to human dignity.” Almost every country in the world currently criminalizes organ sales, including kidneys. As one medical ethicist put it, markets in body parts are “simply too exploitative of the poor and vulnerable. The quality of the organs is questionable. People lie to get the money. The middle men are irresponsible and often criminals.”

Maybe. But each person has two kidneys and needs only one for a full and healthy life. The law says it’s fine—even noble—to give away a spare kidney. Thousands of people make that gift every year. So why can’t you sell one? Transplant doctors profit, hospitals profit, so why not the providers of the raw materials? Is your spare kidney different, in some essential way, from spare kidney beans you can sell from your garden?

Certainly, paying for kidneys may exploit vulnerable sellers. Perhaps it degrades our sense of common humanity. But if we are serious about saving patients with organ failure, experience suggests that allowing some limited form of sale is the only sure path to people’s survival. Voluntary donations and organ donor checks on driver’s licenses don’t produce nearly enough kidneys. Neither does encouraging young people to ride motorcycles (called “donorcycles” by emergency room doctors). Categorically prohibiting sales ensures the premature deaths of an estimated 43,000 people annually in America, the same death toll, as one study puts it, “as from 85 fully loaded 747s crashing each year.

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