Business

Kidney Transplants Legal in Iran

By Dweep Chanana ⋅ November 17, 2006 ⋅  Email this post ⋅ Post a comment

Iran, apparently is one of the few countries that allows people to legally sell their kidneys. And The Economist approves:

With proper regulation, a kidney market would be a big improvement on the current, sorry state of affairs. Sellers could be checked for disease and drug use, and cared for after operations. They could, for instance, receive health insurance as part of their payment—which would be cheap because properly screened donors appear to live longer than the average Joe with two kidneys. Buyers would get better kidneys, faster. Both sellers and buyers would do better than in the illegal market, where much of the money goes to the middleman.

Instinct often trumps logic. Sometimes that’s right. But in this case, the instinct that selling bits of oneself is wrong leads to many premature deaths and much suffering. The logical answer, in this case, is the humane one.

Ironic that a member of the ‘axis of evil’, and one of the most anti-American nations, is also in this context one of the most capitalistic.