Kidney Or Kids

Which would you like to keep? This is a question an increasing number of parents have to ask themselves. It's just capitalism working its wonders; no longer are the poor limited to just selling their labor, now they can choose to sell their body-parts or their children as well! Isn't that just wonderful..?

I stumbled across an article the other day with this horrible headline: Afghanistan: Parents sell children and kidneys to feed starving families. While this has become a headline recently, this is nothing new, unfortunately. The only reason why it's headline-material right now is because the western forces, the U.S. in particular, have withdrawn their military from the country; the Taliban rules there now. When NATO forces left the country, they did so without having declared a win or a loss. In fact neither the Americans nor the Russians could ever win a war in that harsh country, as it has been at war continuously since 1978 with foreign forces involved since 1979. And for Afghans, the Afghanistan Conflict hasn't ended yet.

What's so disturbing here, is that billions, maybe trillions have been spent on waging war in that country, first to stop communism and later to stop terrorism, supposedly, and that the country has now been left to build everything up by itself. "We" went over there, bombed the country to kingdom come, for 10 years in the 1970s and 1980s, and then for 20 years in the 2000s, and then simply packed our stuff and left. That's what makes this particular headline of Afghan parents having to choose between kidneys or kids so shameful and disturbing.

After reading the article, I suggest you do that too, I searched on Google with the term "parents sell kidney"; I suggest you do that as well, because you'll see that this is happening all over the world in countries of all levels of development, and it has been happening for decades. If this doesn't make you sick, if it doesn't make you angry, I suggest you set your priorities straight. There are people all over the world right now seriously considering selling their kids or body-parts or both:

Yet, selling her daughters’ future was not the only agonising decision Rahmati was forced to make. “Because of debt and hunger I was forced to sell my kidney,” she tells Rukhshana Media from outside her home in the Herat slum.
_{source: The Guardian}

How much are kidneys and kids going for these days, you ask? Read the articles; it's shockingly low. Glancing over the search-results I see that a man sold his kidney to pay for medical treatment for his obese sons, a woman who sold a child to pay for another child's education, a kid who sold his kidney to save his sister.

Now, I have to say that 1) people can survive just fine with one kidney, 2) selling kidneys, or any other body-parts, is illegal in most countries, so the organ-market is a black market, and 3) there are arguments to be made to open up some sort of market for kidneys, because every year people die while waiting for an organ-donor, and treatment with dialysis is only possible for a limited amount of time and very expensive to boot. The truth is that there's a plentiful market out there for kidneys, if only donators would be given a financial incentive. Nevertheless, this would quickly become... complicated. Would desperately poor people be forced into selling their organs? Well, yes. Would unwilling people have their kidneys forcibly removed and then sold? I suppose so, organ trafficking is not just the stuff of horror movies: Organ trafficking in Egypt: ‘They locked me in and took my kidney’.

Everything's for sale. That's a fundamental problem of the global socioeconomic arrangement called capitalism. When profit is the overriding goal in a society, everything eventually become a commodity. With the trading of emission-rights, we've set a price on clean breathable air; air finally worked its way up to get the same status as drinkable water... So why am I so surprised to see organs and kids being sold? You tell me...

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