Organ Trade in the Philippines: Signs of the Times?

In an article posted in the Sunday Telegraph News last September 23, a couple speaks of coming to the Philippines to look for a kidney for sale, since it’s “legal” to buy and sell kidneys in this country. The woman who is suffering from end-stage renal disease (ESRD) is currently surviving on regular dialysis. But if she is to have better health, she needs to have a kidney transplant as soon as possible. Due to the shortage of donors in Australia, she’s forced to look elsewhere for a new kidney. And since she’s part Filipino, she would have a better chance of finding a close match in the Philippines.

It seems, however, that the writer of the article failed to research some important things. If he or she had tried to search Yahoo! or google for news or articles about organ trading in the Philippines, the writer would have found that there’s a Philippine law citing it’s illegal to buy and/or sell kidneys in the Philippines, which is Republic Act No. 9208, known as the “Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act of 2003″.

The relevant information can be found in section3:

(a) Trafficking in Persons – refers to the recruitment, transportation, transfer or harboring, or receipt of persons with or without the victim’s consent or knowledge, within or across national borders by means of threat or use of force, or other forms of coercion, abduction, fraud, deception, abuse of power or of position, taking advantage of the vulnerability of the person, or, the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person for the purpose of exploitation which includes at a minimum, the exploitation or the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery, servitude or the removal or sale of organs.

However, as we all know, even if something is illegal, it doesn’t necessarily mean that something isn’t being done.

There are numerous foreigners who flock to the country to have their kidney transplants, for reasons not so different from the woman from Australia. Most of these foreigners are sick rich men and women from the Middle East. And kidney donors that they find here are mostly Filipino men who live in the slums and work as tricycle drivers, factory or construction workers, or even unemployed. Both the donor and the recipient arrive in the hospital with numerous medical lab and diagnostic test results, usually done in some other hospital. Days after the operations are performed, a nephrectomy for the donor and kidney transplant for the recipient in the adjacent operating room. There will be two surgical teams, a group that will harvest the kidney. And the second group that will transplant the harvested kidney. Imagine the drama as the scene unfolds. Could the surgeon holding the organ container be feeling the weight of the significance of his burden to the two patients as he transports the valuable kidney from one operating room to another? Perhaps. And this drama happens almost everyday of the week in a tertiary hospital in Metro Manila and, most probably, in many other big hospitals as well.

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