Category: Health and Wellness
Woman offers to sell her eye
Date: April 20 2005
Dhaka
An impoverished Bangladeshi woman has placed an advertisement in a
Bengali-language newspaper seeking to sell one of her eyes.
The advertisement inviting offers was placed in the classified columns
of the daily Ittefaq newspaper on Sunday by a woman named Shefali Begum
from Dhaka.
"Shefali Begum is very poor. All she wants is a good sum of money so
that she can buy her only daughter a piece of land in the countryside
and thereafter
live a happy life," Begum's landlady, Rini Sattar, said.
Doctors in Bangladesh oppose the sale, saying they fear it might start a
trend among the poor.
Cornea transplants are only permitted in Bangladesh after the death of
the donor.
"We strongly condemn it," said Mustafizur Rahman, a leading eye
practitioner and adviser to the Bangladesh Opthalmological Society.
"This would be a first ever instance of someone in Bangladesh selling an
eye. We will ask the government to make it a criminal offence so that it
doesn't
become a trend like the sale of kidneys," he added.
Advertisements offering kidneys for sale appear regularly in Bangladeshi
newspapers.
Nearly half Bangladesh's 140 million population live on less than a
dollar a day.
Sadly selling body parts is all too common in impoverished countries..eyes and kidneys are in demand...
Maybe the government of Bangladesh should consider offering some sex education and free contraceptives! 140 million people and the number keeps growing because people do not know how to prevent unnecessary pregnancies and births. With less mouths to feed, the country's resources could offer the people lives that are a bit better off. Star
You could say the same in Britain. We have the highest teenage pregnancy rating in Europe, and I hope the selling of body parts isn't made illegal. I've only got the one eye, one of the many legacies of my rare medical condition which made me totally blind in the first place.