Scott Carney’s 2011
book, The Red Market: On the Trail of the
World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers, is
not a book for the squeamish or for the faint of heart. If you can get past the
slightly uncomfortable premise though, it’s an engaging and thought-provoking
read about the implications of living in a world where the component parts of
people’s bodies are attached to an economic value, and how people are exploited
into literally selling parts of themselves for a chance to escape poverty.
Carney, an investigative
journalist by trade and a contributing editor at Wired, begins his book by outlining the types of economic markets
people are already familiar with: the white market which contains all the sale
of legal goods and services; the black market which deals in the sale of the
illegal materials; and the grey market which deals with legal commodities
distributed through illegal means. Carney proposes a fourth market, the red
market, which deals in the sale and distribution of human tissue. What follows is a book focusing each chapter
highlighting products that we all possess but have likely never thought of
selling such as: bones, kidneys, blood and hair. The book also investigates the
practice of paid surrogacy, illegal adoptions and paid clinical drug testing.
In his introduction
he states how his personal interest in the subject matter began. An interesting story about how as a teacher in
India, a student he was responsible for committed suicide. As her chaperone he
was responsible for transporting the body from rural India back to her parents
in the United States. This experience
opens his eyes to the price tag that accompanies every human life, and how
people become, in many cases, treated like objects after they die. These themes
are present throughout the book. The
setting of India is important, as most of the stories are centered in various
parts of India and its thriving red market. However the book does recognise that the red
market operates on a huge international scale and explores the global red
market.
Even though this is
his first published book, Carney’s journalistic expertise is on full display.
Each chapter is well written and well researched. He has an excellent knack for
finding and writing engaging human interest stories, in all of his interviews
you get a good sense of the people he is talking to and how desperate their
situations are. You also can see the immense amount of respect he has for the
people he speaks to and interacts with. He never judges people who have entered
the red market, instead he asks that the reader understand how they are victims
of terrible situations. He does not however refrain from judging the middlemen
and the people who benefit from the red market and exploit and coerce people
with no other choice, into exploitative and potentially risky situations.
Given the subject
matter it should come as no surprise that these stories are more often than not,
absolutely heartbreaking. One chapter immediately comes to mind about a young
boy who was kidnapped in India and adopted by an American couple who was told
the child was an orphan. Carney interviews the boy’s parents in India, who have
spent their lives trying to find out what happened to their son. Thinking they
have tracked down the boy’s adoptive family in America they ask Carney to reach
out to them and ask them to let them be in contact with their child. Carney agrees and the family refuses to
believe that they could have participated in something akin to child
trafficking and refuse to reach out to the family in India.
Many of Carney’s stories
reflect this, people believe that they are being altruistic but in reality they
are not thinking about where their donated eggs, surrogate mothers and adopted
children come from. Many people refuse to think about who may be exploited in
the supply chain.
One of the reasons for this, he suggests, is caused
by the language that we use to speak about the red market. We ‘donate’ blood
and organs; we ‘give the gift of life,’ when we become organ donors. This
language he argues leads to people being exploited, since people do not think
of kidneys, blood and eggs as commodities, or as something desperate people may
sell in order to feed their families. We see them as precious gifts. As someone who regularly donates blood I see
this language being used in advertising by Canadian Blood Services regularly.
Absent from their pamphlets is the reality that my blood may be sold to other
hospitals for profit.
In the beginning of
the book Carney admits there are no easy answers to solving the problem of the
existence of the red market, he wonders if a system where the rich do not
benefit from the bodies of the poor can exist in a world where people want to
live longer, combat infertility and adopt foreign children. One of his proposed
solutions is to have fully transparent donations. Carney argues that when every
adoption is fully open and every organ is fully traceable, this will force
people to see that the donations come from real people and leave less room for
middlemen to exploit the system.
“The Red Market: On
the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child
Traffickers, “is an amazing read. At parts it can be disturbing, a tad
graphic, though the pictures featured in the book are thankfully gore free. As
someone who is squeamish and an avid avoider of any and all horror movies I did
not find it too distressing and as someone who is a frequent blood donor as
well as a registered organ and bone-marrow donor I found it absolutely
fascinating.
After reading the
book and thinking about the questions it raises, I too agree that there are no
easy answers. We as potential customers of the red market have to ask ourselves
if we are hurting anyone by helping ourselves.
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