What Makes “Markets in Body Parts” So Controversial?

Abstract

If one were a newcomer to the field, I guess it would seem legitimate to ask why some ubjects and some types of exchange cause few public controversies, while others instigate hype, hope, and fear as well as legislative reactions. Nevertheless, few scholars explore the differences in the attention given to exchange systems handling, for example, hair, spittle, breast milk, skin, cornea, bone marrow, bone, tendons, blood, plasma, cord stem cell blood, embryos, gametes, organs, heart valves, arteries, muscle tissue, tumors, brain tissue, or dura mater, as they unfold in different arenas regionally, institutionally, and historically. It is obvious from even the most casual observation that some types of ubject exchange, blood samples used in research, for example, provoke controversy, and stimulate “ethics debates” in some contexts and periods (e.g., genetic research in the 1990s), while exchange of the “same” ubject in other contexts provoke no noticeable reactions (e.g., nutritional research or diagnostic biobanks in the 1980s and 1990s). Also, there are clear differences in the public attention given to, for example, heart transplantation and hair extension, as well as to transplantation of whole hearts versus arteries and heart valves. For me, at least, such differences provoke a basic curiosity, and I believe that such puzzles are important for understanding all the fuss about “markets in human body parts.” Since it is clearly not every “body part” generating controversy, we cannot assume that “body parts” hold some inherent, universal, and undeniable moral quality. In fact, as argued in Chaps. 3 and 4, it is never clear what is “part of” a body, and even metal and heat are good candidates. By choosing “ubject” as our analytical term, rather than “body part,” we can begin to investigate patterns in the work involved in making an ubject into a body part so that it becomes related to a subject (or, alternatively, make it into a plain material resource).