Living‐Unrelated Kidney Selling in Pakistan: Can Organ Transplantation Law and Social Action Create a New Model for Developing Countries?

Abstract

Pakistan made its name as one of the leading kidney markets during the last 15 years because of the availability of willing organ donors. A major motivating factor is poverty, which induces the underprivileged to proffer their organs to the marketplace. Vendors (i.e., people selling their kidneys) hope that compensated kidney donation will lead to a better life that is debt‐free and without despair. By engaging kidney brokers, private hospitals have commercialized the milieu and set aside misgivings about abusing the poor for profit. Contributing factors to this practice are analyzed in this article. The administration in Pakistan must assuage the predicament of the deprived, and in addition must strengthen and stringently enforce both the organ transplant law and compensated organ donations to curtail a recalcitrant and unethical kidney trade.

Global Policy Considerations in the Health Context

“…Papers presented at the Workshop and subsequently published include Nayebpour and Koizumi's “The Social Stigma of Selling Kidneys in Iran as a Barrier to Entry: A Social Determinant of Health,” (2018); Fry‐Revere et al's “Introducing an Exploitation/Fair Dealings Scale for Evaluating Living Organ Donor Policies Using Iran as the Test Case” (2018); Elias, Lacetera, and Macis's “Understanding Repugnance: Implications for Public Policy” (2017); and McSorely et al's “Dialysis Providers’ Perceptions of Barriers to Transplant for Black and Low‐Income Patients: A Mixed Methods Analysis Guided by the Socio‐Ecological Model for Transplant” (2017). Earlier transplant work published in our pages include “Geographical Disparity in Access to Organ Transplant” by Koizumi, and Akhtar and Bari's (2012) consideration of kidney selling in Pakistan.…”