Attorney Dominic Barbara alleged that Dr. Richard Batista offered his wife one of his kidneys when she needed one.
Richard Batista is demanding a settlement and wants his kidney returned, as Dawnell Batista has filed for divorce. Alternatively, Barbara stated today that his customer desires the kidney’s worth: roughly $1.5 million (£993,000).
The Supreme Court in Mineola, New York, is hearing the case.
Barbara stated that his client, a Ronkonkoma native and 1995 graduate of Cornell University Medical School, wed Dawnell Batista on August 31, 1990. Their three children are now fourteen, eleven, and eight years old.
Barbara stated that his client gave his wife a kidney during a procedure on June 18, 2001, at the University of Minnesota Medical Centre, following two unsuccessful transplant attempts. Richard Batista said that the stress of his wife’s health problems was the reason his marriage was falling apart at the time.
Batista stated, “My priority was to save her life,” during a Garden City press conference. “The second bonus was to turn the marriage around.”
According to Barbara, Dawnell Batista, 44, of Massapequa, filed for divorce in July 2005. It was not possible to reach her or her Garden City-based attorney, Douglas Rothkopf, for comment at this time. At Rothkopf’s office, a receptionist informed me that he was in court.
Experts on medical ethics concurred that the case is unviable. Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania’s Centre for Bioethics said it was “somewhere between impossible and completely impossible” that the doctor would either receive his kidney back or get paid for it.
A medical ethicist from Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Robert Veatch, stated that “it’s illegal for an organ to be exchanged for anything of value” first and foremost. In the US, it is illegal to purchase or sell organs. Organ donation is a gift, and according to the law, “you can’t get it back when you give something.”
“It’s her kidney now and … taking the kidney out would mean she would have to go on dialysis or it would kill her,” Veatch stated.
According to Caplan, an organ cannot also be given a monetary worth in the future. “There’s nothing later [you can get] in terms of compensation if you regret your gift,” he stated.
Furthermore, he claimed that no respectable surgeon would carry out such a transplant and that no judge could order someone to have surgery.
