More than 60,000 people whose kidneys do not work wait for transplants. Many survive, supporting, fitted during hours to dialysis machines. These machines clean their blood, replacing it to the ill kidneys. But they cannot work as well as a kidney. Dialysis is painful, exhausting and expensive. So those 60,000 North Americans pray daily for a new kidney. Some receive them from friends and relatives. Others obtain them from strangers who pass away in accidents.

But accidents and altruists do not provide enough kidneys, so that, in a typical day, seventeen North Americans die waiting for kidneys. Many patients in dialysis are desperate. Ed Lavatelli said to us that the price is not a problem. "I would pay what I had to pay, really... because it is undescriptible to be a person with renal failure. It really is."

Tragically, the agony of Ed was unnecessary, because there were piles of people ready to help him. Ruth Sparrow, St. Petersburg , Fla. , needed money, so she published an announcement in the press that said: "Kidney, works well, 30,000 dollars or to the best suitor". It received a pair of serious calls, she said, but then the newspaper informed her that she could be detained.

Why it is not allowed for desperate people to use money as incentive? Because there are others that hate the idea, and since some of them are in the government, they have the power of locking up those that do what they hate.

I spoke with Steve Rivkin that entered a kidney waiting list when this list had "only" 30,000 names. "I do not believe that there is evil in paying money for a kidney transplant", he said "I only want a kidney that works".

Doctor Brian Pereira, ex- president of the National Kidney Foundation, said that he sympathized with the necessities of Rivkin. "The good news", he said, "are that this person can continue under the present system in dialysis, which works extremely well". Seventeen died to the day of a system that works "extremely well"? When I confronted him with this data, he answered that the men would be vulnerable to "the operation" if there were legal markets of kidneys.

I found photographs of men of the Philippines that had exchanged a kidney for barely 1,000 dollars. They were posing their scars in a beach. Such photographs make the rich Americans say: "These poor men were exploited!

"They risked their lives for hardly 1,000 dollars". But what gives us the right to decide for them? Nobody forced them. They wanted 1,000 dollars more than to have two kidneys. To say that the poor man is too desperate to resist a dangerous temptation is to be paternalistic. Poor men must also have the right to decide what to do with their lives.

Steve placed an announcement in Internet and shortly after people worldwide called him to sell him a kidney. Pereira says with severity: "That's when we must enter scene".

No doctor that is when you must step aside. Like many anointed experts, Doctor Pereira thinks that he and others like him "the government, the associations of professionals who help the government to adopt the correct policies" - must make our decisions for us. But that deceit condemns people to suffering and finally to die, as it happened to Steve Rivkin.

The government and societies of professionals do not have right to do that. They are not the proprietors of your body. You are.

Maybe some politician thinks that it's moral to make decisions for you, if he and all those that agree with him can obtain his election.

But that road leads to the death of someone that needs a kidney, and of being deprived of what he wishes but that the politician and his comrades do not want him to have.

There is a better and more obvious morality: the one that each one of us has the right to life and freedom; that each one of us is proprietary of our own life and has the right to work to preserve it and to enjoy it.