Over the last couple of days I've been reading a book by Peter James called 'Dead Tomorrow'. It's a tale of Romanian street children being kidnapped and killed to provide organs to transplant patients in the UK (and elsewhere), and it gave me pause for thought.
One of the central characters is a woman with a terminally ill teenage daughter who is in desperate need of a liver transplant. After being let down by the NHS, and fearing for her daughter's life, she turns to the internet and contacts an international organ broker. Despite knowing that a number of dead bodies have turned up in the area minus their organs, she shuts her mind off to the possibility and chooses to believe what she is told - that the liver will come from a donor who has died in an accident abroad.
Reading it did make me consider just how far I would go if it were a matter of the life or death of one of my children. I like to think that I would never consider buying an organ on the black market, knowing that it would mean someone else's unnecessary demise, but it's easy to say that sitting here with 3 perfectly healthy children sound asleep in their beds. Obviously I hope I'm never in that position, but I can imagine being prepared to do just about anything to give my girls a chance of survival. Would I descend to such desperate measures though?
How far would you go to save your child's life?
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Oh you scary lady!
ReplyDeleteThat said, all the time I was ill, it almost seemed to me that the worse I got, the better luck my mum was having. To me it felt a totally fair price to pay for her to have a nice life. Love definitely skews your normal perspective of what's acceptable.
Didn't mean to sound scary! Can't imagine that I would ever do something so terribly wrong, but I guess you never know just what you might do in such an instance. You're absolutely right about love though.
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