This isn't the first time. There was a scandal with blood donors. Its illegal in the Netherlands to sell your blood but blood banks were importing blood from the US.
Poor people shouldn't have to resort to selling their body.
Poor people shouldn't have to resort to selling their body.
I think it's complicated. Poor people shouldn't need to "resort" to anything. We should have safety nets for people who are poor. But given that we don't have those safety nets, we should be at least a little cautious about removing mechanisms for them to help themselves, even if those mechanisms have potentially harmful elements.
I don't know what the current underground/black-market situation looks like for selling blood, but I don't take it as a given that a regulated market would be worse than what we have. I would need to see data that supported that conclusion before I jumped to it.
Though the most interesting organ-based financial instruments would be rights to harvest organs post mortem, which several people in this thread seem to be overlooking.
And no matter how intellectually satisfying it would be if it were true, I don't think Western culture (or psychology in general) agrees with you that sex is just another service like computer repair. We don't have special categories of crimes for forced computer repair at gunpoint for instance. And we don't shame and fire overbearing bosses for pressuring employees into illicit computer repair.
This part of the argument does not apply to the case of selling your body after death. Making it illegal to sell one's body after death seems more logical to me then.
And has been pointed out by you and others, one can theoretically sell the rights to one's body parts after death, assuming the contract is enforced.
If blood instead was paid for people would be incentivized to lie, people desperate for cash wouldn't care about the consequences. For example junkies who might have all sorts of shit in their system.
Getting enough plasma or various immunoglobulins can be the difficult part.
And sometimes you heavily depend on a few outlier cases, like this guy that’s estimated to have saved 2.4million through his 1000 donations:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Harrison_(blood_donor)
Many of the screening questions just reduce waste in the face of plenty of willing donors.
No, but only because the European countries which prohibit compensation for tissue donations solve their shortages by importing tissue from the US.
The 35 year old dying in a car accident probably has a lot of people depending on them that could use the money.
It could be a “free” life insurance policy.
This argument in particular applies in both cases.
In other words, both stem from a belief in "human dignity".
There isn't really anything special about sex work, societal views on it aside. It's hard work, but for many people it causes no more harm to their dignity than anything else they could be doing.
Source: sex worker friends.
Semantics aside, the real problem is the (desperation of) poverty, not the results of it.
I suspect this is an adaptation to both increase hemoglobin transport, but also to reduce cancer risks.
In that context, anybody who works hard labor is trading in part of their health for income because many labor-intensive jobs will take their toll on the body [0]. Up to a point where people either have to switch line of work or go into early retirement, as certain parts of their body stop functioning properly and they are stuck with chronic pains for the remainder of their lives.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-work-occupational-...
The human body is amazingly reliable, no comparison to "dead" (non-self-sustaining, non-self-renuvating) machines.
I also do not find selling your hair, your blood, your saliva or urine or your sperm or what ever your body produces as selling your body.
It does not follow that there are no ethical boundaries for departing from these "products".
As a result, other countries with volunteer donation systems aren’t self-sufficient for plasma.
Instead they usually rely on US imports. To the point of blood products accounting for 1.3% of all US exports.
Poor people can sell their labor. Poor people can sell sex in the Netherlands. Why shouldn't they be able to sell other fluids?
Have you done some coke last month? Just tell and nothing will happen, except you won't be donating any blood for the next 11 months. Have you done some coke last month, but also really need money to feed your kids? It might be really tempting to lie and get that blood bank money anyway.
I would much rather rely on testing donated blood than taking someone's word for it, no matter how much money they were or weren't paid.