Before I left for my vacation, the CBC (for which I am a compensated consultant) asked me to write a piece on its new documentary Eggsploitation, a warning about the health risks to women from egg donation. I watched the DVD (I have one line in it), and found it very powerful–particularly since I am worried that destitute women will one day be colonized for their eggs for use in biotechnological research. So, I wrote “A Preventative Against Biological Colonialism.” From my piece:
Colonialism of nations is dead, but a new form of resource hegemony is a-borning. Rather than exploiting commodities such as copper deposits and timber forests, the new colonialism is biological, seeking to mine living human bodies. Thus, we see rich westerners buying kidneys from destitute Pakistanis and Turks. Worse, livers and other vital organs in China are purchased for huge sums despite the purchasers knowing that the “donor” was almost surely tissue typed and killed so he could “donate” his body parts.
But organs are not the world’s most expensive biological products. Ounce for ounce, the priciest biological commodity in the world today is also one of the tiniest marketable item literally worth far more than its weight in gold—the human egg. Indeed, throughout the country, young women at elite universities are solicited to sell their eggs—sometimes for tens of thousands of dollars if they exhibit certain eugenically approved characteristics such as the beauty of Marilyn Monroe and the brains of Albert Einstein. These ubiquitous ads—which can be very enticing to college students whose knees are buckling under the pressure of student loans—don’t mention the potentially lethal consequences of being mined for eggs.
Egg donation is often pitched by buyers without warnings about the potential risks. These can include infection, disability, infertility, cancer, even death. In addition, according to the film, no studies have been conducted about the long term impact on women from donating their eggs. That needs to change.
Some of the women in the film discuss how their serious health concerns were not taken seriously by the egg brokers. I write:
Why might this be? Donors are not patients in the traditional sense, that is, people presenting with maladies to be treated with care for the duration of their illnesses. Rather, they are means to an end for the real patients of the clinics—the women who will be impregnated with the embryos made from the donated eggs. As a consequence, in some perhaps unconscious sense, the donors may be viewed as a resource to be harvested and then forgotten. Indeed, the film documents how donors quickly become out of sight and out of mind.
Most of the film deals with women selling or donating eggs for use in IVF. But if human cloning is ever perfected–some scientists are demanding the right to buy egg, the shortage of which is a significant impediment to perfecting human cloning–the demand would become vertical: Then, it would be, destitute women of the world, beware! I conclude:
Given the speed in which the fertility and biotechnology industries are advancing, protecting women here and abroad from “eggsploitation” has become a matter of urgent concern. Medical studies are needed to identify donors and examine the breadth and scope of long-term risk from egg extraction. Hearings need to be held to begin the important job of placing rigorous regulations over the field, including, perhaps, the requirement that solicitations for eggs contain health warnings such as those now legally required in cigarette advertisements. Perhaps it should be made illegal to sell eggs in the same manner as it is against the law to sell kidneys. International protocols need to be negotiated to protect poor women from being biologically colonized.
We really do need to regulate the sale of gametes. The stakes in human health and societal welfare are just too high to permit laissez faire gamete procurement.
August 29th, 2010 | 11:27 am
Wesley, educate me.
If you juxtaposition this with the news that governments are putting sterilization agents into water supplies and vaccines, how do we analyze this?
Is the attempt to build a better mousetrap of human being or whither away inferior genes? I’d be curious to hear your take.
Either way, it’s all quite sick and twisted.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
August 29th, 2010 at 4:08 pm
I don’t know anything about putting sterilization agents in water. But if true, it would be a moral wrong of the most profound kind, amounting to involuntary medication that would profoundly affect one’s health and bodily functions. I don’t see that as the same thing as vaccines. Most vaccines are voluntary. However, I support mandatory vaccines for communicable diseases for children in school. I think that is good public health.
I think the biological colonialism is a mix of things, including not giving a heck about the destitute and feeling entitled to use them for one’s own benefit, whether fiscal or health. The most odious is buying organs in China knowing that someone was tissue typed and killed for the sale.
What do you think?
August 29th, 2010 | 12:11 pm
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August 30th, 2010 | 6:01 pm
Spain has the highest number of donors per million population in the world: 34.3. And the lowest percentage of negative family: 18%. Since 1979, more than 250,000 people in our country have received a transplant of organs, tissues or cells. Among them, 47,190 kidneys, 17,231 livers, hearts 6048. More than 10% of all transplants performed worldwide.
Have survival rates higher and higher: 30% of the beginning is already above 80%. There are patients who are 20 years and 30 liver transplanted kidney, and it just reminds them of their status of transplanted a couple of pills a day. Gradually, the transplant has left the experimental nature of their beginnings and already practiced by all the autonomous regions, including the poorest.
The number of donors has tripled in fifteen years. “It exceeds the rate of 8 points in the U.S. and double the European Union average, now at 18.1 donors per million inhabitants.” Matesanz is aware that the more organs are obtained, more candidates are accepted on the waiting list. “We need more bodies than ever because there are still targeted at patients who die waiting list.”
The tremendous success that has starred in Spain has become, inadvertently, his main obstacle: “The Spanish program works so well that transplant waiting lists for organs are collapsing for decades by patients who could not even access them” patients over 65 years, obesity, diabetes, cancer, HIV … Everybody grab a list that can return to life.
In 2009 Spain has become to beat a record itself in accounting for 4028 and 1,605 transplant donors. There are more than 2382 kidney transplants and 219 lung over. They have grown all transplants except heart, pancreas and intestine. On March 28 the ONT is aiming its best daily to coordinate 13 32 transplantations from multiorgan donations in eight regions. “This improvement is a credit to the elderly, accounting for almost half of the donors,” Matesanz itself acknowledges.
August 30th, 2010 | 6:02 pm
The organ donation in Spain is always so altruistic. The whole process is borne by the National Health System.
The Spanish model ensures that everyone has an equal right and equal opportunity to receive a transplant.
They are entitled patients suffering irreversible damage to liver, heart, lung, intestine, pancreas or kidney, can not be cured with another or is the only solution to prevent death.
Patients are assessed individually by a transplant team and, after having accepted the application, is included on a waiting list.
To assign a body set criteria based on territorial aspects (proximity) and clinical aspects.
The family consent: we are all donors if we have not expressed otherwise. This forces the family to ask the will of the deceased.
In conclusion, the success of the Spanish model of organ donation and transplantation is in large part to the solidarity of the families in hard times choose to donate and, especially, for the excellent coordination work of the ONT, which has merit been recognized by the international organization The Transplantation Society, the Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation 2010.
August 30th, 2010 | 6:31 pm
Buy organs is very usual in lands without National Health System:Pakistan,Iran, India and China.But in Spain The organ donation is always so altruistic. The whole process is borne by the National Health System.
The Spanish model ensures that everyone has an equal right and equal opportunity to receive a transplant.
Unfortunately in countries like India and China there are people without scruples who wants to enrich the expense of people being harassed by loan sharks. Multiple studies show that countries that allow organs to sell just ruining the lives of sellers, these organo Persian language after they have less health, they can not escape poverty, the money they receive makes them fall again into the hands of loan sharks … is terrifying to think of the abuses of egg donation, whether or sale of ova is related to abuse in developed countries like the USA will happen in countries like India or Cambodia?
August 30th, 2010 | 6:54 pm
Spain boasts transplant system to the world. With the highest rate of donations (34.4 per million inhabitants) has become a model to be exported. The European average is 18.1 persons per million. “If it was like the Spanish, would save 20,000 lives a year,” said the Minister of Health, Trinidad Jimenez, during the first session of the International Conference on Organ Donation and Transplantation being held in Madrid.
August 30th, 2010 | 7:00 pm
Rafael Matesanz: “Selling an organ is one of the most rending evils of this century and against whom it is worth fighting”
“Selling an organ is a form of slavery: human body in exchange for money,” says Rafael Matesanz unfettered, convenor of the Transplant Organization (ONT), which launched in 1989 and has achieved the highest donation rates World
August 30th, 2010 | 7:06 pm
I recommend reading this excerpt from the interview:
http://www.deia.com/2010/03/29/sociedad/euskadi/vender-un-organo-es-una-de-las-lacras-mas-lacerantes-de-este-siglo-y-contra-la-que-merece-la-pena-luchar
Someone selling an organ for somebody else buys it
In organ trafficking should be clear thinking. It is a terrible scourge of the century. Someone sells part of his body because some people buy it. What happens in the third world is because there are citizens first and to induce purchase of organs that do not stop marketing. In cases such as the Basque who came to China there are times that the tree will not let us see the forest, you have to pull for elevation. One I can understand from the strict point of view of personal anguish, but I think the issue is absolutely unacceptable from every point of view of a human being imaginable.
How to prevent marketing of this new slavery?
Those who have to put the solutions are the Western countries, because Japan and Israel are the biggest buyers. The countries of greatest economic power are the ones who must control their citizens. In this sense, the initiative that was launched between us, to amend the Criminal Code, it is in the correct line. People who are buying a kidney are committing a crime, regardless of whether it is being done in Spanish or European territory or place in a third country. Also the person who will intermedie facilitator of the offense, so you will have criminal liability.
What about the sick?
It is not penalized. It is intended as a deterrent to prevent this sort of thing can continue to give. In addition, it must be emphasized that Spain has the finger transplant tourism, although I recognize that in other European countries is a relatively frequent. The cases published were now known facts.
So what in your opinion should be the keys to a transplant? Does altruism should be the engine transplant?
I am a strong defender of our transplant system: free and anonymous. Anything that tends to break this puts you at risk. Altruism should be the engine of donations. We must preserve that is not made by an economic interest.
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