“…When the borrowers defaulted on their loan payments, the creditors used verbal, mental, and physical tyranny for loan recovery (see also Karim ; Rahman ). It was then that organ sellers exchanged debt for dignity (see Moniruzzaman , , ). As liver seller Kobul noted: I could have run away from the moneylender.…”
Section: Embodied Sufferingmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Instead, they faced adverse economic consequences as their damaged bodies impeded their ability to return to their physically demanding jobs such as rickshaw pulling, heavy industrial lifting, and day laboring; therefore, some sellers were back in debt again after selling their organs. The long‐term ramifications of the organ trade, not only for sellers, but also for their families, communities, and countries, are all‐encompassing and deeply disturbing (Moniruzzaman , , , ).…”
The rapid growth of organ transplantation has created an illegal market for human organs sourced from the destitute poor predominantly in the developing world. Drawing on challenging fieldwork, I investigate the lived experiences of organ sellers who sold their bodily organs on the black market of Bangladesh. Sellers’ narratives reveal that living without an organ is not just a bodily alteration, but instead it results in embodied suffering and ontological impairment of being in the world. Organ sellers reported that they experienced embodied suffering due to selling their vital organs, which violates long‐standing cultural practices, such as bodily integrity, body ownership, and human dignity. In addition, these sellers faced subjective suffering due to selling living parts of themselves. As they felt, selling an organ divided their whole body into two halves, which destroyed their homeostatic balance, ontological harmony, and affinity with recipients. Sellers referred to these embodied and subjective sufferings as “heavier selves.”
“…When the borrowers defaulted on their loan payments, the creditors used verbal, mental, and physical tyranny for loan recovery (see also Karim ; Rahman ). It was then that organ sellers exchanged debt for dignity (see Moniruzzaman , , ). As liver seller Kobul noted: I could have run away from the moneylender.…”
Section: Embodied Sufferingmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Instead, they faced adverse economic consequences as their damaged bodies impeded their ability to return to their physically demanding jobs such as rickshaw pulling, heavy industrial lifting, and day laboring; therefore, some sellers were back in debt again after selling their organs. The long‐term ramifications of the organ trade, not only for sellers, but also for their families, communities, and countries, are all‐encompassing and deeply disturbing (Moniruzzaman , , , ).…”
The rapid growth of organ transplantation has created an illegal market for human organs sourced from the destitute poor predominantly in the developing world. Drawing on challenging fieldwork, I investigate the lived experiences of organ sellers who sold their bodily organs on the black market of Bangladesh. Sellers’ narratives reveal that living without an organ is not just a bodily alteration, but instead it results in embodied suffering and ontological impairment of being in the world. Organ sellers reported that they experienced embodied suffering due to selling their vital organs, which violates long‐standing cultural practices, such as bodily integrity, body ownership, and human dignity. In addition, these sellers faced subjective suffering due to selling living parts of themselves. As they felt, selling an organ divided their whole body into two halves, which destroyed their homeostatic balance, ontological harmony, and affinity with recipients. Sellers referred to these embodied and subjective sufferings as “heavier selves.”
“…In developing nations, like Bangladesh, TT results in violence and the exploitation of the poor and vulnerable. For those involved, the philosophy of an unethical practice is neutralized by financial gain …”
Liver transplant tourism is travel for transplantation involving organ trafficking and/or transplant commercialism. Various medical, financial, and organizational factors play a role in transplant care including waiting lists, Model for End-Stage Liver Disease scores, and financial aid. We outline the international experiences with transplant tourism (TT) and its effect on their medical communities and patients. For clinicians providing care to patients involved in TT, we also discuss pretransplant counseling and posttransplant care. Liver Transplantation 26 276-282 2020 AASLD. liveR tRAnsplAntAtion, vol. 26, no. 2, 2020 Hindi et Al. Review ARticle | 277
TT ReformAt the Declaration of Istanbul (DoI) summit in 2008, international transplant researchers and politicians defined specific acts related to the process of illegal organ transplantation. The DoI acknowledged TT and provided ethical and social transplant guidelines for individual countries in an effort to curb TT. Moreover, the differences in definitions for travel for transplantation and TT were distinguished. Travel for transplantation is the movement of organs, donors, recipients, or transplant professionals across jurisdictional borders Zaid Hindi and Mayur Brahmania were responsible for the study concept and design and for drafting the manuscript.
“…However, all of the arrested brokers managed to get bail after five months in custody, and they are now brokering organs just as before (Parvej ). The state of Bangladesh legitimizes the structural exploitation and fails to combat the organ trade (see Moniruzzaman ).…”
Section: Exploitation and The Organ Tradementioning
The rapid growth in organ transplantation has created an illicit trade in human organs. The kidney trade has flourished in the last few decades, but in the last few years this has been coupled with an emerging liver trade. This article examines the liver trade sourced from poor sellers in Bangladesh. Through ethnographic fieldwork, I investigate how a landless farmer and a village housewife both sell their liver lobes on the black market, and how the recipients undergo liver transplants in Bangladesh and India. I reveal that liver selling, like kidney selling, is primarily driven by the sellers' debt. What is surprising, though, in this anthropological analysis is that microcredit, a Nobel Prize-winning economic operation, has negatively contributed to organ selling in Bangladesh. I discover that the liver trade leads to tragic outcomes for both sellers and recipients: the sellers could not repay their loans by selling a liver lobe, while one of the recipients died just over a month after the surgery. I therefore argue that liver trade is advancing through a series of disturbing ironies, resulting in bioviolence, exploitation, and suffering for the vulnerable victims.
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