Divorcing husband wants kidney back
GARDEN CITY, N.Y. — When his wife needed a kidney transplant, Dr. Richard Batista gave her one of his, attorney Dominic Barbara said.
Now that Dawnell Batista has filed beneficial to a divorce, Richard Batista wants his kidney back as part of his settlement demand. Or, Barbara said Wednesday, his client wants the value of that kidney: An estimated $1.5 million.
The case is being heard in Supreme Court in Mineola, N.Y.
Barbara said his person represented, a 49-year-old learned man from Ronkonkoma who graduated from Cornell University Medical School in 1995, married Dawnell Batista on Aug. 31, 1990. The couple had three children, now ages 14, 11 and 8.
After she had two failed transplants, Barbara declared, his client donated a kidney to his wife in an operation at the University of Minnesota Medical Center on June 18, 2001.
Richard Batista said his marriage at the era was upon the body the rocks for of the wrench of his wife’s medical issues.
“My first priority was to save her life,” Batista declared at a news conference in Garden City. “The second honorarium was to turn the marriage around.”
Dawnell Batista, 44, of Massapequa, filed for divorce in July 2005, Barbara said.
Neither she nor her attorney, Douglas Rothkopf, of Garden City, could immediately be reached on account of comment. A receptionist at Rothkopf’s room said he was in court.
Medical ethicists agreed that the case is a nonstarter. Asked how likely it would be for the doctor to either get his kidney back or get money for it, Arthur Caplan at the University of Pennsylvania’sitting Center for Bioethics, put it for example “in one place or another betwixt impossible and completely impossible.”
First and foremost, said Robert Veatch, a medical ethicist at Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics, “it’s illegal for an organ to be exchanged for anything of rate.” Organs in the United States may not have existence bought or sold. Donating an organ is a present and legally “when you accord. something, you can’t get it back,” he said.
“It’s her kidney now and … taking the kidney out would mean she would have to go in succession dialysis or it would despatch her,” Veatch said.
Nor can you assign a subsequent monetary value to an means, Caplan said. “There’s nothing later (you have power to get) in terms of satisfaction if you lament your offering,” he aforesaid.
