Welcome to part II of a series of posts highlighting discussions of organ donation on the Taboo Trades podcast. So far, I’ve discussed Imminent Death Donation and The Political Economy of Organ Transplantation.
Today, I want to highlight this wonderful episode, Kidney to Share, with Martha Gershun and John Lantos.
Martha and John are authors of Kidney To Share, published by Cornell University Press, which details Martha's journey as a stranger donor. Martha is the former Executive Director of Jackson County CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) and her previous work has appeared in The Kansas City Star, The New York Times Magazine, and The Radcliffe Quarterly. John D. Lantos, MD, is Director of the Bioethics Center at Children's Mercy Hospital and Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Missouri Kansas City School of Medicine.
In this episode Martha and John discuss their book, Kidney To Share, which I reviewed here. The book alternates between chapters from Martha and John, with Martha taking readers through a personal account of her non-directed kidney donation to a woman she had never met but shared a number of social connections with and whose story she came across in a local media story. John’s chapters place Martha’s personal experience within the larger context of the history and ethics of living kidney donation.
It is a fascinating account. You will read this and marvel at the fact that anyone would complete the expensive, time-consuming, and opaque process to become a living donor for a complete stranger. That is a terrible state of affairs, and not only because the transplant waitlist currently stands at over 100,000 people (the vast majority of them waiting for a kidney) and we need more living donors to address the shortage. But also because, as I was reminded during the ugly “Bad Art Friend” affair, living donors deserve better treatment. As Martha concludes in the podcast:
So we've been all around the country and I've been telling people this is the most meaningful, important experience of my life and everybody should enjoy these benefits. And that has inspired literally no one to benefit in this specific way. I think that tells you a lot about the ways we might and might not think about connecting around living organ donation.
This episode was produced with some fabulous UVA Law students. Kaitlyn O'Malley and Caitlyn Stollings (UVA Law '22) are co-hosts, and appearances are also made by Nevah Jones, Alex Leseney, Thalia Stanberry, Samantha Spindler, and Tom DelRegno.
Just writing that out makes me think of that group and wonder where they are: hope you’re all well and thriving!
You can listen to Kidney to Share here, or in the embedded player below (or on apple, spotify, and other usual suspects).
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