The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [60]
Then his landlord demanded payment, and Nawas had only two things of any value to sell: his children or his own body parts. He chose the latter. He contracted with a local broker to sell a kidney to a “transplant tourist,” most likely someone from Europe, Australia, or the United States who needed a kidney and was willing to pay. Nawas now sports a foot-long scar on his lower back, acquired at a “kidney center.” In return, he was paid around $1,600. But he’s now less able to work, because his strength and stamina are not what they used to be.
Nawas explained his decision this way: “I am helpless. Should I sell my children? Should I go sell my children? So, it’s better I sell my kidney.”
Nawas’s decision is not unusual. Organ selling has become prevalent around the world. In Pakistan, a poor farmer can sell his kidney for $1,600. In Brazil a kidney can fetch $10,000, more than a decade’s wages for some. Some newspapers in Africa carry classified ads offering cash for organs. The broker stands to make substantial income, since organ recipients pay as much as $150,000. Organ brokerage is such a lucrative business that, according to the World Health Organization, about a fifth of all kidneys transplanted worldwide come not from charitable donors but from the black market. This market has even gotten a toehold in the United States: in 2009 the FBI arrested a New Jersey man for matching organ “donors” in Israel with recipients in the United States.17
Even though it is illegal in most countries, organ trafficking is a thriving business. In the words of Newsweek, “Most of that trade can be explained by the simple laws of supply and demand.”18 The market values what people are willing to pay for, and it is no surprise that some will pay a lot of money for a desperately needed kidney. Where the market has its say, even our bodies become commodified.
It is thus no surprise that Nawas’s other choice was to sell his children. The sale of children, especially girls, has become a sickening fact of life in many areas of the world. In Malaysia, baby selling is “big business” for crime syndicates.19 The syndicates run prostitution rings staffed with poor peasant women, deny the women the use of contraceptives, then steal the resulting babies. The babies are then sold for as much as $50,000, presumably to couples unaware of how they came to be.
But Nawas’s children would not have been sold to couples in the West who wanted children. In all likelihood they would have ended up as prostitutes. The trafficking of both girls and boys into prostitution is rampant. According to UNICEF, more than a million children a year are trafficked for sex, and more than half of the children who are forced into sex slavery are under sixteen. In Pakistan, the sale of Afghan refugee girls is “thriving,” with prices ranging from $80 to $100, depending on the color of their eyes and skin and whether they are virgins. In some villages in Thailand, as many as seven out of every ten families have sold at least one daughter into the sex trade, at prices ranging from $100 to $900.20
Trafficking is not just a problem in developing countries: about 25 percent of the world’s sex tourists are from the United States, and news reports of American parents selling or pimping their children are becoming more common. In 2010, two parents in Georgia allegedly offered their fourteen-year-old daughter to a local car dealer. They were late on their payments on the family minivan, so the parents forced their daughter to perform sex acts on the dealer in lieu of their car payment. The parents and the dealer were arrested.21
It might be easy for us to think of this as a faraway issue. I do not fear that my own children will ever be sold, notwithstanding the