I kidney you

One good/bad thing about training for the 60-mile is the ample time for thinking. It's less so on the treadmill, as most of my focus is on music or how much I hate treadmills, but today was nice enough to walk outside for a bit. Walking outside can be extremely therapeutic. When Francine Shapiro allegedly "invented" EMDR therapy, she did so after realizing how unburdened she felt after taking a walk and watching birds flitter by. I'm looking forward to spring, and warmer weather for the next 20 weeks of my training.
I digress as usual. While walking I began thinking about organ donation. Specifically, live donation and why more people don't do it. Why aren't there movements encouraging live donation? Commercials encouraging that like there are for everything else. Come to think of it, there aren't even campaigns encouraging post-mortem donation, or encouraging people to think about making provisions in the case of brain-death. Organ donation upon death can save up to eight lives. I understand there is a touchy religious component to all this. Is this the problem with live donation?
Obviously some tissues/organs can't be given from a live donor- heart, pancreas, etc.
But if I were asked, or the opportunity presented itself, I would donate an organ without hesitation. I admit, in my lower, most desperate, poverty-striken moments I definitely wished I could auction off any of my desired parts for cold hard cash. And had I found a market, I probably would have- but that black market is disappointingly difficult to locate.
I did try to sell my eggs a couple times, but apparently no one wants to have my babies. I'm going to try not to take this personally and instead chalk it up to a heredity riddled with cancer.
But this isn't what I'm talking about- I'm referring to altruistic donation without compensation- but I found these passages on Wikipedia interesting:

"Two books, Kidney for Sale By Owner by Mark Cherry (Georgetown University Press, 2005); and Stakes and Kidneys: Why markets in human body parts are morally imperative by James Stacey Taylor: (Ashgate Press, 2005); advocate using markets to increase the supply of organs available for transplantation. In a 2004 journal article Economist Alex Tabarrok argues that allowing organ sales, and elimination of organ donor lists will increase supply, lower costs and diminish social anxiety towards organ markets.

Iran has had a legal market for kidneys since 1988, and the market price is of the order of US $1,200 for the recipient. The Economist and the Ayn Rand Institute approve and advocate a legal market elsewhere. They argued that if 0.06% of Americans between 19 and 65 were to sell one kidney, the national waiting list would disappear (which, the Economist wrote, happened in Iran). The Economist argued that donating kidneys is no more risky than surrogate motherhood, which can be done legally for pay in most countries."

In the United States, 110,460 people are awaiting organ donation. Nearly 90,000 of those are awaiting a kidney transplant- a donation which is completely feasible for a living donor (in fact, kidneys from living donors last an average of 3 years longer than those from deceased donors). Another 16,000 of those are awaiting liver donation- also available via living donor.
18 of those awaiting donation will die each day.
Numbers are even larger in some other countries. More than 2 million people need organ transplants in China, 50,000 waiting in Latin America (90% for kidneys), as well as thousands more in Africa.
I'm just saying... perhaps it's the communist approach to organ donation, but I think we have enough for everyone.
As of today, there are approximately 307,006,550 people in the United States.
There shouldn't be an organ donor waiting list.

Maybe I should put my money where my mouth is.