Sell Your Kidneys, Just Not to Foreigners

By Foroozan Darabi, IranWire’s Citizen Journalist

The following piece was written by an Iranian citizen journalist on the ground inside the country, who writes under a pseudonym to protect her identity.

The buying and selling of kidneys is a widespread practice in Iran that occasionally makes its way to the top of the news. The latest report to surface in the media concerns two Iranians who donated kidneys to two Saudi Arabian nationals, the death of one of whom also made headlines.

News coverage of the country’s kidney trade and official reactions are infrequent but a tour of areas around hospitals, especially the street where the Society for Support of Kidney Patients is located, shows that the trade is ongoing and bustling. You will find numerous advertisements on the walls for people seeking to sell their kidneys.

Most ads include a phone number, the vendor’s blood type and at least one “Urgent!”. If you call some of the numbers you find out that the basic reason for selling kidneys is financial need. A few say they are in debt and others have a variety of reasons, from marriage expenses to costs needed to cover the medical treatment for a family member.

According to statistics published in the media, kidney donations constitute 85 percent of all organ donations in Iran. Brokers play an important role in Iran’s kidney trade, operating as middlemen between buyers and sellers and pocketing a substantial amount of money even before the two sides meet for the transplant operation.

Iranian law does not forbid selling and buying of kidneys or other organs. The first time Iranian lawmakers tried to bring the question to the floor of parliament was in 1994 but they were unable to come to any resolution. A single-article law was introduced entitled “Law to Allow Transplant of Organs from the Body of the Deceased under Certain Conditions.” The law stipulated that “using the organs of the deceased or of people who are brain-dead for transplanting in the patients who need them is allowed provided conditions are observed.”

A year later when the proposal came to the floor it was rejected by 112 against, 86 for and nine abstentions. Since then no other laws on transplants have been introduced or approved, and as a result, no law has oversight over the kidney trade.

The only limitation that the law imposes is forbidding the donation of kidneys by Iranians to foreign nationals. It came about in 1993 when the Society for Support of Kidney Patients became concerned that many foreigners were taking advantage of the lax laws and were traveling to Iran for kidney transplants, thereby reducing the supply for domestic patients. It sent an inquiry to the Iran Medical Council, an NGO responsible for licensing and regulating healthcare professionals. The council replied that, based on the bylaws of the Health Ministry ,an Iranian cannot be a kidney donor to foreigners and that the “transplant of kidneys from live people to foreign nationals is forbidden.”

But this created problems for the Iranian hospitals that sought to perform kidney transplants operations on foreign nationals. So in 1998 the directive was amended by the Health Ministry officials to read that if both the donor and the recipient share the same nationality the transplant can take place; otherwise it is forbidden.

This was the reason that the donation of kidneys by Iranians to Saudi nationals made front-page news.