Should People be Allowed To Sell Their Organs?
By Alice Park,
Time / CNN
| 07. 03. 2012
How much would it take for you to consider selling your bone marrow? A
U.S. appeals court puts the price at about $3,000 in a ruling that now
makes it legal to pay donors for their bone-marrow tissue.
The court's decision may
well help thousands of sick patients who need bone-marrow transplants to
survive, but it also begs the question, What other body parts might
next be up for sale?
The ruling
came about at the end of 2011, in a decision to an October 2009 lawsuit
brought by a group of cancer patients, parents and bone-marrow-donation
advocates against the government over the federal law banning the
buying and selling of bodily organs. The plaintiffs were led by Doreen
Flynn, who has three daughters who suffer from Fanconi anemia, a blood disorder that requires bone-marrow transplants to treat.
Flynn and the other
plaintiffs said that too many such patients die waiting for transplants
and argued that we should be allowed to pay people to donate their
marrow as a way of ensuring a more reliable supply. The U.S. Court...
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