Have a heart? Then think about donating it.
Have you signed up?
Go to organ donor.gov and share the gift of life.
I clicked the box.
But most people don’t.
As a result, more than 100,000
people wait hoping to get a kidney.
Most wait years.
one of three waiting on that list will die
because there is simply not enough organs
available.
whenever demand exceeds supply,
black markets appear.
Profits are huge.
Single organ selling for up to $200,000.
So why not legalize the sale!?
Then there would be no need for black markets.
Legalization would make transplants safer
and bring prices down.
People legally sell blood, plasma,
sperm, eggs, bone marrow.
Why not a kidney?
Poor people are going to be hurt.
philosophy professor Sam Kerstein advised
the World Health Organization, which supports
the laws that ban selling organs.
Body parts to be put into Americans will come
from poor countries.
I don’t want to see poor people in Pakistan
having their lives truncated.
Having to go through psychology difficulties.
But these people may want to make other choices
and who are we to tell them “you may not”.
We are people who care about people who are
different from us and poorer than we are.
That's why we care.
Deep moralisms about the dignity of human
life being degraded by commercialism
it's all crap.
Law professor Lloyd Cohen, 24 years ago went
on 60-Minutes to argue that people should
be allowed to sell a body part.
Transplant surgeons make money, transplant
physicians makes money, hospitals make money,
drug companies make money.
Everybody can get paid except the person
who is delivering the irreplaceable part.
In the years since Cohen first argued for
legal sales, thousands of people on
the growing wait lists died.
Without a financial incentive not enough people
give up an organ.
financial incentives work for everything!
They work for food, they work for housing
they work for clothing.
This is exploiting the weak and the poor.
We heard the same argument with regard to
things like surrogacy.
Then you interview the women.
This is a wonderful thing that they can do
and they can get paid.
[prayer]
Oddly the one country that allows the selling
of organs is Iran.
And this PBS report says --
The market has slashed the waiting time
for a kidney down to around a year
When Iran made it legal, there were more kidneys
available and they were cheaper.
And a very high percentage of them say they
regret it. They say that
their psychological health has decreased.
They say that their physical health has decreased.
They're really suffering.
But another study concluded that most donors
did not regret it.
So you've got that on one side of the scale.
So you put on the other side of the scale
vacuous moralisms about our consciousness
of the human body being
degraded by crass commercialism.
And it don't carry much weight.
But it does, the vacuous moralisms are winning.
You've been talking about this for years
why hasn't it happened?
There aren't enough people who want it
and so it just dies.
Then after years of arguing for legalization
Suddenly your kidney stops working.
All men are mortal and Cohen is a man.
Now he needs a kidney.
Cohen’s become one of the growing number of
Americans waiting for one.
He’s unlikely get one, and he won’t turn to the black market.
But there's a wonderful group
called Matching Donors.
It connects voluntary donors with people who
need organs.
And you put up your profile about
what it is you need.
It's rather embarrassing.
I am known by my family, friends for my integrity
my humor, and my incredible good looks.
My son said to put that in.
And he may have found a donor.
At least one very kind sympathetic lady has found
my story relatively compelling.
She is being tested to see if she is
healthy enough to donate.
If not, Cohen will be back on the waiting list,
with about 100,000 other Americans,
receiving expensive dialysis, week after week.
Spending on dialysis alone accounts for nearly
get this, one percent of
the entire federal budget.
Many of those people will die because no one
is allowed to buy or sell a kidney.
Organs that could restore people to health
and extend life are instead being buried and burned.