|
Home
Up
Patient Stories
Transplantation Statistics
Statement of Principles
Our Proposal
Expert Opinions
Common Objections
Documents & articles
List of Endorsers
How to Help
Related Links
What's New?
About the author
British Alert!
| |
Pro-freedom links/pages:
- OrganGiving.org (begun in mid-January, 2003 --
seeks to allow hopeful organ recipients to enlarge their donor pools by posting their
needs and contact information on the internet)
- LifeSharers (This innovative
site seeks to establish a network of people who, when they die, will have their organs
given first to others who've also agreed to donate their organs, and by so doing
encourage others to sign up, so as to gain access to an (hopefully) increasingly larger
share of the donor pool. It's a clever way of circumventing the U.S. congressional
ban on receiving compensation for donating, as it's a payment in kind. Or, one could
look at it as an insurance policy that one pays for by signing an organ donor card.)
- The Kidney Group (based in Vancouver,
British Columbia, Canada, this group "provides consulting and international
coordination services for kidney transplant operations," and claims to be able to
come up with a matched donor kidney in as little as 15 working days)
- Organ Keeper (Comprehensive, and the
closest in thinking to this site. It suggests people opt out of the donor system by
carrying an "organ keeper" card that is the exact opposite of an organ donor
card. The idea is to force our lawmakers to do the right thing, and begin allowing
compensation for giving the gift of life. The problem is, that'd only hurt innocent people
- just as our embargo against Iraq hurts ordinary people, and not Saddam Hussein.)
- "A
Call for Cadaveric Organ Markets", by A. H. Barnett and David L. Kaserman, Auburn
Univ. Dept. of Economics (Presents the basic economic argument in favor of market
incentives: "This failure to procure more organs is directly attributable to an
ill-conceived public policy which was codified in the 1984 National Organ Transplant Act,
sponsored by then-Sen. Al Gore. Specifically, that act makes it a felony to buy or sell
human organs (even cadaveric organs) for purposes of transplantation. In economic terms,
this legislation sets the legal price of organs at zero. And few, if any, products on
earth would not exhibit a shortage at a zero price.") Other articles by Dr. Kaserman & colleagues
- Thomas L. Knapp column,
"Let's put organs on the free market" and his response to a letter in
reply (originally appeared in the Springfield, Missouri News-Leader, November, 1999);
well-written arguments in favor of allowing monetary compensation for organ donors'
survivors)
- Mackinac Center for Public Policy article;
"Organ Donation: Saving Lives through Incentives". Drs. Donald
Boudreaux and Adam C. Pritchard propose offering a small monetary compensation when people
sign up with an organ donor registry
- Human Offal (sounds awful!):
economics dissertation by Vasco Ferreira Almeida, of the University of the Witwatersrand,
South Africa. The web site is still under construction, with only the Introduction
and portions of Chapter 9 up, but it's still worth a visit.
- An ABC
News article about Dr. Jack Kevorkian's April 2001 American Journal of
Forensic Psychiatry article, advocating an on-line organ auction to solve the current
organ shortage crisis.
Neutral links:
- Scientific Registry of Transplant
Recipients website Data, data, and more data - including up-to-date waiting list numbers, grouped
by organ, and detailed information from
dozens of OPOs around the country
- a review of arguments in favor of
organ selling A balanced treatment by Princeton University class of 2002 student,
Lauren Dolnick Goldstein; compares organ selling with the selling of sperm and eggs; many
good links
- About.com
articles about organ selling (NOTE: hit "Go" in the search window
when you get there, for a slew of related articles)
- a balanced discussion of the libertarian views
of University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein, by someone who comes down
against the idea, again, because the debate was framed as one about the sale from living,
rather than cadaveric, donors
- Israel Law Review
(special issue, offering analysis of the subject from a Jewish perspective)
Traditional links/pages:
- Transplantation Society -- click
on the "policy and ethics" button to read their pronouncement on the ethics of
organ selling (typical of such groups, they say the concern is with exploitation of the
poor, but don't distinguish between live and cadaveric donation)
- CNN.com article
(read about "Organ Watch," a group that tracks the overseas, living-donor organ
market, and tries to discourage the practice; also has links to related articles)
- CORE (Center for Organ Recovery and Education; an
Organ Procurement Organization)
- UNOS (United Network for Organ
Sharing; the national organization that determines who gets what when)
- other orthodox links (from our How to Help page)
Other links:
|