“Death’s Waiting List” by Sally Satel, Book Review Example

Thesis

I consider the topic of organs’ donation and transplantation to be quite a complicated one as it is impossible to be objective and to evaluate correctly all pros and cons of the subject unless you have been in the shoes of both the donor and a person who needs organ transplantation. Therefore, I find Satel’s reasoning and conclusion to be a bit subjective as she presents her argument through a prospective of a person on the “waiting list”.

While I agree with the author that the present situation with organs’ donation and the number of people who need it is truly a scaring one and it requires immediate governmental intervention, I find some of Satel’s proposals to be quite unethical and selfish. The greatest of them, which at the same time is the main arguing point of the author, is paying to the living for kidney donation. It seems to me that such a practice is an inappropriate one, even if it will be regulated by the government, not because of my personal disgust, but simply due to the fact that living human body is sacred and it is not right to treat it “as if it was “for sale”” as the Institute of Medicine states (paragraph 12).  If it is considered to be unethical and dangerous to test new drugs on people for money, then it automatically should be considered unethical and dangerous to sell organs of living people for money. The author states:  “Besides, how is it [kidney donation] unfair to poor people if compensation enhances their quality of life?” (paragraph 13). It may be right from the material and financial points of view, but not in terms of one’s health. It seems to me that despite all the preparations and medical screenings that a donor undergoes before and after an operation, there is still a great risk of damaging one’s health. While it isn’t that crucial when a person is willing to donate an organ to a beloved person or one simply wants to help somebody, it is much more important if the only motivation is money. In such a case, a donor stops thinking about own health and concentrates all the attention on the present moment when money are needed without thinking about the future.

Although I find Satel’s process of reasoning and sequence of matching claims to conclusions to be a logical one, still it seems to me that there are some gaps in the author’s examples and evidence. Firstly, while the article provides a reader with a statistics on how many people there are on the waiting list to get new organs, the statistics on how many organs are coming from altruistic donors is missing. Secondly, even though I find it to be quite a persuasive method to describe on her own example all the stages of desperation that a person goes through when one is in need of an organ, the thing that I don’t like is that Satel doesn’t provide the reader with the stories of donors who decided to donate their organs and then had problems with their own health. Thirdly, there is another point that is missing in author’s argument that is the acknowledgement of the fact that if the sale of organs for money will be legalized then the criminal situation around this issue will definitely become much worse even in spite of the governmental regulation of the process.

Furthermore, there are some sorts of inconsistency in Satel’s reasoning and the way she presents it. In the beginning of the article she says that the largest amount of needed organs comes from cadavers – “More are waiting for livers, hearts and lungs, which mostly come from the deceased donors” (paragraph 2) – if so then there is no use of stimulating living people to sell their organs by paying them. Moreover, at this point Satel’s disappointment and frustration with the proposals raised by the Institute of Medicine is also quite difficult to understand. It seems to me that their initiative of “expanding donor eligibility to patients who died of cardiac arrest” (paragraph 9) truly makes sense and it can bring positive change to the problem with the amount of donated organs.

However, some of the proposals presented by Sally Satel are quite persuasive and it seems to me that they may be quite easily implemented. One of them is to launch an “effective European practice of “presumed consent” in which citizens are considered donors at death unless they signed an anti-donor (or opt-out) card” (paragraph 10) and the second one is to provide people with a possibility to “receive compensation…in installments before death or to his estate afterwards in exchange for permission to recover his organs at death” (paragraph 11). I think that these two initiatives are more ethical and humane in the way that they deal with the dead bodies, not the living ones. And at this point, as Satel stated in her final paragraph, the only reason against the implementation of such actions may be a personal distasteful attitude towards the practice, but as it was stated at the International Forum for Transplant Ethics: “If we are to deny treatment to the suffering and dying, we need better reasons than our own feelings of disgust” (paragraph 13).

Thus I can draw a conclusion that as it was Sally Satel’s own problem she presents the argument only from the viewpoint of a person who needs the transplantation of an organ, but she absolutely ignores the inner feelings and thinking of a donor. Her only reasoning at this point is that the donor will definitely be benefited from the financial point of view. While stating the ethical problem of how cruel it is not to give people those organs that they need, she doesn’t really think about the ethical aspect of asking people to give up their organs for money. Therefore, I don’t think that the idea of paying organ donors is an inescapable one and that it is the best solution to the problem of the lack of organs for people who need transplantation as the author states. It seems to me that there could be found other effective alternatives.

Works Cited

Satel, Sally. “Death’s waiting List.” 15 May 2006. 15 Oct. 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/15/opinion/15satel.html