Can’t Afford Tuition? Just Sell an Organ!

A high-level doctor advocates ‘allowing’ students to pay for their education by selling their organs. After all, they’re ‘allowed’ to go into debt for the money!

Recycling an oldie but goodie:

by Heidi Stevenson

If you thought that selling kidneys only happens in poverty-stricken nations, here’s a heads-up: It’s now being pushed here. A high-ranking UK doctor now advocates that students sell their organs to pay for tuition. Lest it seem like a bit of a joke, note that the publisher is the so-called “prestigious” British Medical Journal!

This is disturbing enough, but the role she has played in making ethics determinations in the UK’s medical system is downright frightening. Sue Rabbitt Roff is currently a senior research fellow with the Dundee University Medical School. She is on the Investigation Committee and Registration Decision Panels for the General Medical Council of the UK. For those outside the UK, this is the same agency that took Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s license to practice medicine—and the panels Roff serves on make the decisions on whether to revoke licenses.

And it gets even worse! Roff is on the Regulation and Compliance Board of the Institute of Chartered Tayside Local Research Ethics Committee, where her area of interest is the ethics of human subject research with particular reference to organ transplantation

So, a key arbiter of medical ethics and a decision-maker in who may or may not practice in the UK has written for the most prestigious medical journal in the UK saying that students should be “allowed” to donate organs to pay for tuition.

Roff’s Twisted Logic in Pushing Organ Sales by Students

The logic Roff uses to push organ sales by students starts with this statement:

We are allowing young people to undertake £20,000 to £30,000 of university fee payments. [Emphasis mine]

As she sees it, students aren’t being burdened with exhorbitant costs to pursue an education. No, Roff believes that they’re being handed the privilege of taking on exhorbitant debt to pursue an education.

From there, it’s a short hop to organ donations:

We allow them to burden themselves with these debts. Why can’t we allow them to do a very kind and generous thing but also meet their own needs? [Emphasis mine]

Since we allow students to take on debt in the pursuit of an education, why don’t we simply allow them to sell of their organs to pay off that debt?

Then, Roff gets in even deeper:

One reservation that many people express about such a proposal is that it might exploit poor people in the same way the illegal market does now.

But if the standard payment were equivalent to the average annual income in the UK, currently about £28,000, it would be an incentive across most income levels for those who wanted to do a kind deed and make enough money to, for instance, pay off university loans.

So, apparently, the proposal to allow students to sell organs isn’t exploitation of the poor because getting paid might be an incentive for wealthier people to make donations? Huh?!!!

And she’s even decided how much an organ should cost! An average year’s salary. Roff has covered all bases. Aren’t you impressed?

By the way, Roff doesn’t even comment on the fact that removing healthy organs carries risks, including the ever-more-common deadly drug-resistant infections. And she’s supposedly an expert in medical ethics!

One last note on Roff: She’s duplicitous. Her hypocrisy becomes clear when she says that she, herself, wouldn’t donate an organ, because:

I don’t feel the need or the pressure for money. I’m a middle-class person and I’m not in that situation. But we shouldn’t legislate for other people.

Isn’t it very patronizing for those of us who are well-off to make decisions for those of us who are not? People must be allowed to make their own decisions.

So, somehow it’s patronizing for people who are well-off and don’t have the need to sell organs to pursue their life’s goals to tell people whose options are limited that they should. She is saying that it’s simply a matter of choice to sell organs, while acknowledging that she wouldn’t do it herself because … well, she doesn’t have to make such a choice because she’s wealthy.

The Utter Callousness of Modern Medicine

Even the most respected journals are involved in this twisting of medicine, as clearly evidenced by the BMJ printing Roff’s student organ donations suggestion.

Sue Rabbitt Roff is one of the highest level decision makers in the UK’s medical system. She is one of those with the power to end a doctor’s practice for whatever shabby excuses they wish to offer. With someone like her in that position, isn’t it time to insist that Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s case be reviewed by impartial observers? Or that the attacks on Dr. Sue Myhill come to an end?

Roff is part of a system that has seen fit to allow doctors who kill continue to practice, while taking the licenses of ones who’ve done no harm and had no patient complaints. There is no question that this system is utterly corrupt, serving a different master than the patients whose bodies and lives are trampled by their decisions.

Tagged conventional medicine, high cost of tuition, modern medicine, sell kidney, sell kidney for tuition, sell organ for tuition, student tuition