Our Film on MSNBC
My associate Ric Esther Bienstock who directed “Tales From the Organ Trade” that we produced together with Felix Golubev was interviewed on MSNBC. I think she’s doing an incredible, even-handed job of putting the issue of buying and selling of kidneys on the world health agenda.
My own approach is more aggressive: it is completely patronizing for rich doctors to refuse to do transplants when a poor person is selling his/her kidney. The whole activity has been criminalized. The idea is that a poor person is “coerced” by his/her poverty. The logic of this is that only rich people can make informed decisions. The problem is that the rich people want to buy, not sell. The fact is that anybody who needs a kidney would do anything to save their life, and anybody who has two healthy kidneys would sell one to lift their children from poverty. It’s time we regulated and decriminalized the buying and selling of kidneys. The dying has to stop.
See Ric’s interview:
Click here to see my recent article “The Nails That Dare Not Speak Their Name” on The Times of Israel
