If It Saves One Life…

One often hears it said, in justification or support of a given policy, that if it saves even one life, it will have been worth it. I don’t happen to subscribe to this view (at least in all cases), but it does have a kind of moral earnestness about it that I admire. I wonder sometimes, though, to what extent people really mean it, and to what extent it is just a slogan.

For example, in the last ten years more than 30,000 people in the U.S. alone have died from kidney failure while waiting for a transplant. While most kidney transplants currently come from deceased donors, live donor transplants are also possible, with fairly little risk to the donee (typically a person with one kidney is just as functional as with two, and since the causes of kidney failure usually strike all of a person’s kidneys, the main health risks associated with kidney donation are no different than for any other surgery). Most if not all of those 30,000 could have lived, if only someone could have been induced to donate a kidney. Yet under the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, it is illegal to pay someone to donate, even if only to compensate them for the lost wages and medical costs associated with the surgery. Repealing the law has the potential of saving tens of thousands of lives, and if it saves even one life….

As it happens, there is a country where the sale of organs is legally permitted.