It's been reported that two Canadian companies are willing to pay blood donors to get their plasma. Plasma is used to produce immunoglobulin, a high-cost treatment for diseases that include cancer.
Is there something inherently wrong in commodifying and commercializing the human body, selling our organs or tissues?
Some people believe it offends human dignity to treat the body as an object and just another item for sale. Others see respect for individual autonomy and choice as required to respect human dignity and allowing sale as necessary to honour these values. These two positions focus at different levels and embrace different concepts of human dignity.
The former sees dignity as inherent simply to being human and is concerned to uphold respect for both the dignity of each individual person and human dignity, in general, at the societal level. This requires that the human body be "hors de commerce."
Adherents of the latter view see individual persons having control and choice as necessary to respect their dignity, hence, if they want to sell their blood, they must be allowed to do so.
Ethics is always concerned with facts, especially about risks and harms. We have tended to assume a non-commercial blood supply is safer than a commercial one, on the grounds that people who sell blood are more likely to present health risks to the system than those who donate. That might not always be correct, because of other factors influencing decision-making that affect the safety of the blood system. Some commercial US blood banks proved to be safer than the Canadian blood system at the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The owners acted faster to take as many preventive measures as possible because they feared law suits and financial loss.
Read more at Mercator.Net.
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