Are your kidneys available to me? - Fourth in a series

If you’re willing to ask a living person, a total stranger, to rescue you from the queue of those patiently waiting for a deceased donor organ, or from the onus of asking a relative or close friend to rescue you from dialysis, be aware that you are entering a moral, social, ethical, and political grey zone. You’re putting the seller and yourself at risk.

This statement goes against the current grain of cultural wisdom. Are these the words of a religious fanatic? No, anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes is currently Chancellor's Professor (Emerita) of the Graduate School of the University of California at Berkeley, and an advisor for the WHO, the UN Anti-Trafficking Office, and TTS, the Transplant Society, on the hidden injuries of transplant trafficking.

I imagine that her students revere her but most others wish she would go away.

Dr. Scheper-Hughes discovered the kidney trade in the course of her research and rewrote the purpose of her academic discipline as she brought to light illegal trafficking from South America to Asia and Eastern Europe. Here’s something else she wrote:

Despite what you may have heard from some surgeons or from transplant brokers, the kidney is not a ‘spare’ organ. If you were able, as I have been, to talk to kidney sellers the world over, you would find that even years after the operation, the sellers are still suffering from its effects on their bodies, minds, social status, intimate relations, and working lives.

Medical journals do not report on the invisible and long-term consequences of kidney selling, which include: decreased physical and mental well-being, chronic pain, depression and suicide, self-hatred, distorted body image (‘half-man’ syndrome), anger, social rejection, isolation, physical abuse, battering, and forced exile from their native communities.

There are new syndromes that don’t appear in medical textbooks: phantom kidneys, kidney regret, kidney-impotence, bodily evacuation (the body without organs), chronic pain at the site of the surgical scar, empty burning space, and the attribution of all subsequent troubles to the ‘missing kidney’.

Economically, kidney sellers are worse off a year after selling their kidney. Because most kidney sellers are poorly educated and are unskilled labourers who rely on the strength of their bodies, many are excluded from work that requires them to lift heavy objects, to leap and jump, to be fearless and unconcerned about the effects of ordinarily rigorous work on their bodies. They fear death. In Bangladesh and Pakistan, kidney sellers refer to their kidney removal as ‘the day I died’, a reference to their economic, psychological, spiritual, and social death. Many seem to have lost their already tenuous existential niche in the world. (ref)

Another chronicler of man’s inhumanity to man, journalist Scott Carney, has researched extensively and shared his findings in a book exposing the billion-dollar industry of brokering human organs, The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers and Child Traffickers. See here for more on the “Red” market.

Mr. Carney writes:

In the real world, kidneys don’t have a fixed price. Instead, the market for human body parts is a lot like the one for used cars: They’re only worth what someone is willing to sell them for. In the age of cheap international travel, where state-of-the-art hospitals abut the most impoverished slums on Earth, hundreds of thousands of people are available and willing to sell their flesh for pennies on the dollar. Some of these areas are so well-known among organ traffickers and brokers that they’ve earned the name “kidneyvilles” for their plentiful supply of willing “donors.” (ref)

Today, we have new facts of life:

When we buy a body part, we take on the liabilities for where it came from both ethically and in terms of the previous owner’s biological and genetic history. It’s a transaction that never really ends. - excerpt from The Red Market

The “donor” of a kidney may not have been a donor at all.

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