Desperate Patients Buy Kidneys Illegally
J E R U S A L E M, July 9, 2001 -- When Moshe Tati's kidneys failed eight years ago, a dialysis machine kept him alive. It took four hours, four times a week, to clean his blood.
He was desperate for a kidney transplant, but getting a donated kidney, he was told, could take 10 years. That's when Tati decided to pay a broker $145,000 to buy a kidney.
"I was in terrible shape," said Tati, through a translator. "It didn't matter how much it cost. I wanted to live like a human being."
There are nearly 49,000 people in the United States waiting for kidneys, the only major organs that can be wholly harvested from a living person. More than 2,500 Americans died last year waiting for kidney transplants.
These numbers, along with desperate economic conditions in the third world, have given rise to a secret, underground industry that is also fueling an explosive ethical debate.
Within days of paying the $145,000, Tati got a call from the broker, late at night, telling him to come to Israel's Ben Gurion Airport. He and three other kidney patients were whisked onto a private plane, joined by a surgical team. They arrived in the Turkish city of Adana two hours later.
The operations took place in a private hospital. The patients were brought in the back door. Tati only glimpsed the man who sold him a kidney. "He was an Iraqi soldier, they told me, who had defected and needed money," he says.
But the surgery didn't go as planned. Tati said he had a heart attack on the operating table because the kidney he bought from the Iraqi soldier turned out to be infected. Today, he's $145,000 poorer and back where he started. He is on dialysis four times a week waiting for a donated kidney that will probably never come.
Brokers Sell Kidneys in Open
Buying and selling organs is prohibited in almost every country, and yet it's happening almost everywhere. Most of the people who sell their kidneys are from poor countries.
In the former Soviet republic of Moldova, one woman told ABCNEWS she sold one of her kidneys for just $1,500. "When your children are hungry, you'll do anything," she explains. "It seemed like a way out."
In Israel, doctors can lose their licenses for doing the operations, but there is no law preventing brokers from arranging the deals.
In fact, brokers advertise openly in the classified section in newspapers. One newspaper advertisement read, "Needed immediately: A Kidney donor. Blood Type 'O'."
In addition, they do business in shopping malls. An Israeli journalist, using a hidden camera and posing as a prospective seller, asked a broker on camera, "How much will I get for a kidney?" The broker responded, "$25,000. Cash."
An Ethical Debate
The idea that organs can be bought and sold used to appall Dr. Michael Friedlander. But then some of his patients started getting into the market.
"I'm seeing patients who were in dialysis treatment," says Friedlander. "Some of them [were] in very bad condition [and] suddenly two or three weeks later coming back well transplanted, very happy and in a completely different state of health."
Most physicians and medical ethicists say that buying and selling kidneys is wrong, period.
"It seems to me a violation of the very nature of what medicine is about," explains Dr. Nancy Sheper-Hughes, "to suggest that the poor should be allowed to dismantle themselves bit by bit with the help of the medical profession."
But more and more doctors argue: It's better to legalize it, regulate it, and protect buyers and sellers alike.
"You can only control it if you make a law allowing it," says Friedlander.
And as Tati knows, in an unregulated marketplace, things often go wrong.