It’s My Bone Marrow and I Can Do What I Want with It!
You’ve heard the liberal refrain, “It’s my body and I can do what I want with it,” except when it comes to bone marrow. The “it’s my body” mantra has been used for decades to support the “pro-choice” cause. (The problem is, an unborn baby is not a part of a woman’s body. But that’s a discussion for another day.)
The logic is simple: The government doesn’t own your body, and neither do other people. You can tattoo it, pierce it, mutilate it, and cut off essential sexual parts, and the government shouldn’t be able to interfere. Stupidity is not a crime.
But is your bone marrow yours to sell? Women sell their hair and blood, but it seems that Kathleen Sibelius, the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, doesn’t want people to be able to sell their bone marrow to people who are in need of transplants even though California’s 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that bone marrow sales are legal.
The decision overturned a law that prevented “‘profiteering’ off of kidney donations” — the Organ Donation Act — and “bone marrow transplants.”
I know it sounds opportunistic for people to make money off of other people’s medical conditions, but what’s worse, not getting needed bone marrow that people are willing to sell and dying? I’ll go for the profiteering.
The Gummoe family, whose children needed bone marrow transplants because of a rare blood disorder, “successfully argued that bone marrow — which can now be donated much more easily by taking cells from the blood — should not be under the same restriction [as vital organ donations] and that the lack of compensation was hindering donations and costing lives.”
There are more than 14,000 people on the bone marrow waiting list. Compensating people for bone marrow should be permitted. If it’s OK to kill an unborn baby that is not part of a woman’s body, then it seems to me that it would be OK for someone to sell needed bone marrow that does not hard the person selling the bone marrow or the person buying it.
If people knew they could make money selling their bone marrow, there’s a good chance that the costs involved would go down. I know I would pay for needed bone marrow if I or my wife, children, and grandchildren needed a transplant. I might even sell a kidney to get it.
As expected, the government is about to step in.
Peter Johnson Jr. explained to the Fox News audience that “HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Health Resources and Services Administrator Mary Wakefield are trying to cut off the compensation again through a new regulation.” The Obama folks got beat in court, so now they want to reinstitute the ban through the regulatory process.
For Obama and Co. the courts are only useful when they rule in their favor.
Here’s the story:
If you want to voice your opinion on this issue, go to regulations.gov or send an email to SGrant@hrsa.gov Make sure you reference regulation RIN 0906 AB02.