You Should Be Able to Pay Bone Marrow Donors
Just another example of government murdering people and getting away with it?
It’s 12:07 AM, and I am still in the airport. Will this plane even take off tonight? Will my wife and I be sleeping under an airport bench? I don’t know. Either way, I figure I might as well be productive while I wait. To that end, I have been sitting here scanning for new #FreedomShorts that we can watch and discuss together for Monday’s post.
I just found and watched a 16-minute film: Everything, from the Institute for Justice. Rather than provide a bunch of preamble or spoilers, how about you just watch it and then we’ll talk…
(NB: I am on the plane now, but it still has not taken off. If my writing isn’t as crisp as usual, please bear with me—it has been a long day.)
I have never given much thought to the possibility of an economic market in organ and marrow donation. But this movie, as you might imagine, has pushed my anarchist buttons. Why shouldn’t people be able to choose this?
After all, it is a voluntary transaction between two consenting adults. No one is harmed in the exchange, and a life may be saved.
There is no moral justification for the sort of governments under which we humans currently languish. But if they’re going to exist, at least they should not interfere with purely peaceful, voluntary transactions.
As I say, I have not given this matter much thought, but thinking out loud, I can imagine a few of the justifications government officials will offer for forbidding an economic market in organ and marrow donations:
Rich people will farm poor people for their organs.
It is a fact of life—some people have more money than others. This is not due to some structural problem in human society that can be fixed with a new system, law, or edict. It is the result of the fact that people are born unequal in talent, intelligence, looks, strength, health, luck, and determination. Attempting to equalize outcomes always requires massive force, and it never works anyways (though communists and socialists certainly do keep trying, and piling up bodies in their attempts).
This means there will always be people rich enough to afford to buy organs, and people poor enough to consider selling them. Are we sure that we should use (the threat of government) force to keep these parties from transacting business, just because of the ugly optics of it?
There will be a criminal market in organ sales
That market exists now. Horrible criminals kidnap people and steal and sell their organs now. Pretending that government is somehow preventing this ghastly thing is the logical fallacy of argument from the brochure.
How would allowing a legal market in donations create more of these activities? Legit doctors could still refuse to implant organs unless the provenance is known and includes a proper contract.
(Update: It’s 1 AM and the flight has been cancelled. The pilots have timed out. Why did they put us on this plane in the first place? They had to know that would happen. I have no idea what happens next, though I can guess…)
Okay, it’s Monday, and what I expected was going to happen next is what happened next. We “slept” in Hartsfield-Jackson overnight. The slightly longer version of the story, for those who enjoy stories of airport SNAFUs…
Our plane was supposed to leave a little after 10 PM, but didn’t even arrive at the gate till around then. Eventually, they told us that the cargo doors wouldn’t open on that plane, so they needed a new one. We changed gates three times, and finally got on a plane at 12:30 AM. Only after that plane was completely boarded did they tell us that the pilots had timed out, and that our new flight would be at 7 AM. (How did they not know that was going to happen?)
They offered a hotel, but there was no way we were going to go back through Atlanta’s TSA process just to get a fitful two-hour nap in some airport-adjacent hotel. Instead, we had strange overnight airport adventures, including a creepy wild-goose chase through a dark tunnel between concourses for some blankets that didn’t exist. It was freezing, too bright…and if I never hear airport trash-jazz again, it’ll be too soon. But at least we have a fun story to tell!
Anyway…
I am sure that procedures could and would be established to ensure a proper provenance of organs, and that all legitimate medical facilities would refuse to do any procedures without such provenance.
Would off-books and criminal procedures happen? Yes. But those also happen now.
Would there be corruption in the organ market? Yes. But there is also corruption now.
I get the ugly optics of an organ market. I get that something about it just feels…not quite right. I get that there are problems.
But if the transactions are consensual, then it is not a form of violence. And the rule of thumb is that (protective) force should only be used in response to the initiation of of (coercive) force. This isn’t that.
The movie focuses on bone marrow, which grows back! (Who knew?) What possible justification could there be—other than a small number of busybodies telling the rest of us how to live—for preventing a market in bone-marrow donations?
Apparently, somewhere around 3,000 people die every year because they can’t find a bone marrow donor.1 How many of those people would live if government just got out of the way?
There’s one way to find out.
I would love to hear your opinions, arguments I have not considered, etc. In the meantime, though, it seems to me that this is just one more example of government being in the way.
Very, very tricky.
Take the analogue of "humane physician-assisted suicide." It's been legal in Canada for a few years now. When presented with the initial proposition, moral people agreed with the logic: if someone is in the final stages of an incurable disease and are in daily agonizing pain, why are we needlessly prolonging that suffering?
That has turned into, "If you're 25 years old, have depression and cannot afford your apartment, how about we kill you to save society some money?"
15 years ago when my brother was taken to a local hospital with a gunshot to his head I was first approached by a Catholic administrator who wanted to privately discuss donation of his organs. He was sure to die, but because his injury was self inflicted, he would die from the his own gun shot wound instead of natural causes (according to their Catholic rules ). So the only way to accept my brother as an organ donor was for him to die mercilessly on machines which are keeping him alive. So they are trying to convince my sister-in-law and I to leave him on the machines so they could take his organs. My sister-in-law made the decision to leave him on the machines, but not before I open my mouth and ask them how much they planned on selling my brothers organs for? I remember the administrator looking down. I asked her again and she lied and said “we don’t sell organs, and then my brothers would be donated. The hospital he was staying and receiving treatment was a Catholic hospital under the Los Angeles diocese, which doesn’t allow organ donations from suicide victims. So this is why they wanted him to stay on the machines. After four days of that nonsense I convinced my sister-in-law to pull the plug. It was very stressful what the administrators were doing to us by adding more weight to our already current grief. I remember one Doctor who was required to be present during our meeting with the administrators looking very disgusted. And it was disgusting, and their approach was cold-hearted and greedy causing me to question the organ donation business. Thank you for this Christopher. ✨💜🙏