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#i hate the way that media glorifies female sacrifice as if it's this glorious thing when it really just reinforces gender inequality
hestiasroom · 6 months
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India: 80% Organ Donors Women; 80% Organ Recipients Men | Vantage with Palki Sharma
Transcript:
Now let's talk about something that's seldom discussed: organ donation in India. One person is added to the organ donation waitlist every 10 minutes - one person every 10 minutes. It tells you how grave the situation is.
Turns out it also has a gender problem and this is according to the latest data that has come out. Four out of five organ donors in India are women. What about those who receive organs? Four out of five recipients in India are men; in other words 80% of the donors are women but 80% of the recipients are men. So why are these numbers so skewed? Our next report tells you.
Last December Indian politician Lalu Prasad Yadav underwent a kidney transplant. Sounds like a normal procedure a simple transplant surgery but it made headlines everywhere. Why? Because the donor was his daughter Rohini Achara. It was shown as a story of sacrifice; a daughter doing what she could to save her father.
The optics were great but data suggests this is the reality of India's organ donation. It's all about sacrifice and usually it's about sacrifice by women. A recent study analyzed organ donations from 1995 to 2021. 36,640 transplantations were carried out in India; 29,000 of them were for men only. 6,945 were for women. If you put those numbers into perspective basically men were 80% of the total recipients for organ donations but when it comes to donations it's a completely opposite scenario.
Women make up for 80% of the organ donors and who are these women? They are usually wives or mothers when their son or husband needs an organ they are the first to volunteer which makes them living organ donors. You see, organ donation is easier between family members this means they are genetically easier this lessens the risks of rejections but what explains this disparity?
Well the answer is socioeconomic pressure in our society. Men are seen as Breadwinners; women on the other hand are seen as caregivers. More often than not they feel pressurized to donate their organs. On the other hand men think twice in a situation like this; they hesitate to go into surgery which means most men donors in India are cadaver donors. That means they donate their organs only when they're dead.
These are stories that make for great headlines: a mother giving a kidney to her son, a wife giving her liver to her husband. They are shown as the Messiah of sacrifice and it's society that is to blame for this. Organ donation shouldn't happen under any sort of pressure it should be a choice that one should take freely.
That said the whole picture isn't too great also India's organ donation rate is quite bleak. It stands at 0.52 per million people. Every 10 minutes one person is added to the waitlist. In 2022 over 2 lakh patients needed a kidney transplant. Guess how many got it? It was only 7,500 people. That's just 3.4% so you get the gist the numbers are bad which is why more people need to step up not just women but more people should be open to donating organs. It's an act that saves lives.
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