There’s a beautiful thing President-elect Obama could do on his first day in office to prove he’s serious about being an instrument of real change.
It’d be politically painless. He’d double-cross no special-interest group. He’d offend no important voting bloc. And he wouldn’t have to create a new federal bureaucracy or spend $30 billion to make it happen.
With just the power of his oratory and his yet-untarnished moral authority, our new changer-in-chief could save 7,000 American lives a year, put an end to the physical and mental suffering of another 100,000 men, women and children, and save billions of dollars in unnecessary medical costs.
All he has to do on Jan. 20 is call for the repeal of the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984. That’s the terrible federal law that criminalizes the buying and selling of human organs for transplant operations—and therefore makes it a virtual certainty that the supply of kidneys, livers, and hearts will never meet our demand for them.
Justifications for prohibiting the trade in major human body parts—including that the world’s poor will be forced into selling their children’s organs to Westerners or people will be kidnapped and have their organs harvested—are largely irrational, exaggerated, or bogus, as an Oct. 11 article in The Economist magazine pointed out.
Meanwhile, the “moral” arguments of the ivory-towered medical ethicists, who think treating human body parts like a commercial commodity is an indignity that trumps saving lives, are indefensible. So is the position of the National Kidney Foundation, which recently lobbied against a bill that would have permitted the mere testing of financial incentives.
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I’d like Barack Obama a whole lot more if he’d take the suggestion in this article to heart:
I like it. Your thoughts?