Tara Sattar
A friend wanted to donate her kidney to her best friend who had a failure of the organ. All the arrangements were made. The woman’s name is Sigrid Fry-Revere.
The pal would disburse for someone to uphold her farm while she was disinclined. It wasn’t imbursement so much as a deal between friends, she says, secretly negotiated and set to profit each.
But Sigrid, who is a bioethicist, could never bestow the kidney.
She was deprived of endorsement to contribute on the debatable basis that she’d be paid for her organ. The health of the friend she wanted to help declined drastically and he passed away gbefore he could find another match. Unconvinced and perturbed, Fry-Revere became a living-donor advocate.
Today, she’s the president of the American Living Organ Donor Network and author of The Kidney Sellers: A Journey of Discovery in Iran.
When asked why Iran, she said, Iran has the only legal, government-supported, compensation-based organ-donation system in the world, and it has a lot to offer. Thirty years ago, they gave up on the [full] market approach, but they are still the only place where they compensate donors.
It’s keeping pace by district. There’s a much synchronized marketplace in Tehran, which is not doing good. The nonprofits who are in charge of making the matches between donors and recipients, consider themselves as recipient advocates.
It often means they want the lowest price that can be afforded. And it often becomes difficult for people who sell kidnedys or other organs to repay debts. There is a lot of exploitation.
200 people were interviewed on one trip and one donor said that he needed six million toman, which is why he was donating. But the nonprofit took him to meet the recipient and his family, and they were crying. “How can I say no when they do that to me?” he told me. He felt trapped. Then, when he went to pick up his check after the operation, he was given no more than three million, where other people in line were receiving up to 10 million.
The national government provides donors a year of health insurance, and the rest comes from a few places. Say, a million toman from the government and the rest would be negotiated — in part from charity and in part from the recipient. The part I think is kind of cool is that if you donate your kidney, you don’t have to do the required national military service.