If you expected to see a long list of countries where you can legally buy a kidney or other organs, you’re pretty optimistic about society’s progressiveness in thinking and morals. Even in the 10 most advanced countries in medicine, organ trade is illegal and it has never been outlawed for a considerable amount of time, despite its predicted positive impact on healthcare. Even though work is being done towards making monetary compensation available so as to encourage people to donate organs in situations that can save a life but won’t impact the donor’s life greatly.
There are many valid points regarding why the organ trade should be legalized. This includes a strict safety regulation which is currently not in place in the black market. Furthermore, the legalization will greatly encourage people who are willing to donate to proceed with said donation. Even if you end up needing money and decide to sell your kidney (which sounds like a joke but happens more than the news will tell you), you can still be safe and even be made to take a period for consideration on whether your decision is a rash and irresponsible one or not. And, even if you are sure you want to donate, modern day medicine has reduced the risk for donors greatly with the extreme precision of today’s procedures and the various medicine available. If we take the most frequently donated organs from living people like kidneys or a portion of a liver, the risk in extracting either rivals that of some cosmetic procedures such as liposuction. Following up on the patient is necessary, though, even with modern recovery techniques. In the case of kidney donation, the remaining one will expand to fill the empty space so there won’t be anything rattling inside you.
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On the other side of the events, selling organs can save the lives of more people than it can harm. And it doesn’t have to be as if people are trading their organs off like steaks in a butcher shop. Instead, selling can be considered a “donation”, only you receive monetary compensation for your troubles and someone else receives the chance to live. It is worth also mentioning that living donor organs outperform the ones coming from the deceased in both efficiency and longevity. However, government-set prices would highly likely be far lower than what you can get on the black market for a variety of reasons with questionable validity. Still, if you put anything other than “donating” in front of “organs” you will get countless frowns just because of the bad reputation that anything from actual organ harvesting to the cinema have created. For the time being, there is only one place that can make the list of countries where you can legally buy a kidney or other organs. Let’s check it out.
1. Iran
There is only one country in the world where organ trade is legal to an extent and this country is Iran. There you can legally buy a kidney and for that reason kidney transplants there have no waiting list. However, the market for organs there is strictly regulated and restricted only to natives. This means that a kidney is the only organ you can legally buy and to combat transplant tourism, the authorities have banned any non-Iranian person from being able to access the trade. This means that immigrants, refugees and visiting people cannot buy or sell their kidney or receive them.The government supports this activity fully through their health administration which play an important role in the trade, manifested in matching donors and recipients. There are measures taken to combat corruption or unfair play such as the anonymity of both the donating and receiving side.
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Before asking the important questions, you’d be interested to know that giving away one of your beloved bean-shaped organs would rake in up to four thousand dollars (or the Iranian equivalent of that). For Iran’s economy and average living conditions this is a big sum but for comparison, a black market-bought kidney can bring its former owner an excess of a hundred thousand dollars in certain cases and mostly the reward would be at least tenfold what the health authorities offer. However, it is worth to note that in both cases there is little to none follow-up on the donor’s health; however, low-risk the procedure has become in recent times. If you opt out for the black market option, make sure you don’t end up with a blood-borne disease such as HIV or hepatitis. Even with big sums of money at play, organ donations of the post mortem sort or donating for free still amounts to a significant percentage of the flow of organs in and out of people. Still, currently Iran remains a one of a kind country where you can legally buy a kidney or other organs.
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