One argument against the sale of human organs is that it will lead to poor people selling their organs to wealthy people, putting the poor at risk for the benefit of the wealthy. There's also the angle that more deaths will occur as people will allow loved ones to die earlier than otherwise so their organs can be harvested. There's also the angle that it's not right to force patients who need an organ transplant to pay for said organ (never mind the transplant). Altruism is a more palatable motivator to those who espouse this belief.
Kerry Howley has a different take at Reason:
Washington University has hundreds of years of western legal tradition on its side, dating back to English common law. Historically, no one has a direct proprietary right in human body parts—least of all the people from whom those parts came. And patients looking for control run up against a highly resistant research community, who see mass chaos in the specter of patient control. Many in the medical community fear that ceding any ownership rights over tissue will lead, eventually, to patients buying and selling their own body parts. Patients who know the value of their tissue, after all, might demand payment for it; ova and sperm “donors” already do. “Selling organs,” frets a recent piece in the New England Journal of Medicine, “might become a matter of right.”
In March, District Court Judge Stephen Limbaugh railed against the intrusion of markets into medicine. “Medical research can only advance if access to these materials is not thwarted by private agendas,” he wrote in his opinion, “If left unregulated…these highly-prized biological materials would become nothing more than chattel going to the highest bidder.” In case the idea of bodily self-ownership wasn’t sufficiently horrifying, he added: “Selling excised tissue or DNA on E-bay would become as commonplace as selling your old television on E-bay.”
And then there's the story of John Moore and his cancer "ravaged" spleen that was removed by his doctor (Dr. Golde).
...Unbeknownst to Moore, his supposedly trashed spleen was teeming with biomedical treasure. Golde derived a commercial cell line from the disembodied organ, and proceeded to patent it. Eventually, Moore became suspicious at the steady stream of vague release forms he was being asked to sign. He investigated, caught Golde, and sued. In 1990, a California court ruled that Moore had no proprietary right to the blood and tissue taken from his body. By that time, Golde had sold the patent for $2 million.
Supporters of the Moore and original Catalona decision argue that patients must be prevented from controlling their tissue, lest the body be commercialized. There's only one wrinkle in this crisp legal separation between body and commerce: Only patients, it seems, are forced to mind it. "We already give property rights, but we give them to the doctor," says Lori Andrews, a professor at Chicago-Kent School of law, Director of the Institute for Science, Law and Technology, and widely quoted expert on biotechnologies. "We have a schizophrenic system."
It's not a question of commercialization. It's a question of property rights. Therefore, the Coase-Rottenberg theorem is applicable. To the extent Coase-Rottenberg applies, organs will still go to the highest bidder and the question thus becomes: to whom does the highest bid go?
HT to The Agitator.