![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Organ donation
Hmm, I've been pondering this decision on and off today and it still seems utterly perverse.
Assuming that a living related donor is likely to provide the best match for a transplant ie. the ill grandmother is unlikely to ever have a better match than her own dead daughter then it makes sense that the organ goes to that person first as there's less risk of rejection and thus greater likelihood of success.
I don't see what's unethical about a gift with reservation ie. to my family first then if they don't need any of my organs they can go into the general pool. If you can 'ethically' give someone a kidney whilst alive, while not once you're dead. If you're a parent of a kid who needs a heart transplant and you die, why shouldn't you have been able to express in a binding fashion that your heart go to your daughter if you're a suitable match and then if it's not it can go to whoever's at the top of the transplant list. [possibly there's an argument that there would be an incentive to murder relatives to get their organs for transplant purposes, but I don't think of it as particularly strong] Why not allow people to put blood relations and family/friends first?
And yeah, I shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but think how much less hassle there'd be here if the dead woman had done more than express a deathbed wish but had started the process of becoming a living donor.
Assuming that a living related donor is likely to provide the best match for a transplant ie. the ill grandmother is unlikely to ever have a better match than her own dead daughter then it makes sense that the organ goes to that person first as there's less risk of rejection and thus greater likelihood of success.
I don't see what's unethical about a gift with reservation ie. to my family first then if they don't need any of my organs they can go into the general pool. If you can 'ethically' give someone a kidney whilst alive, while not once you're dead. If you're a parent of a kid who needs a heart transplant and you die, why shouldn't you have been able to express in a binding fashion that your heart go to your daughter if you're a suitable match and then if it's not it can go to whoever's at the top of the transplant list. [possibly there's an argument that there would be an incentive to murder relatives to get their organs for transplant purposes, but I don't think of it as particularly strong] Why not allow people to put blood relations and family/friends first?
And yeah, I shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but think how much less hassle there'd be here if the dead woman had done more than express a deathbed wish but had started the process of becoming a living donor.
no subject
The other is with allowing people to specify friends as recipients - if someone is in need of a donor it would be tempting for them to seek out someone with a terminal illness & persuade them (e.g. by payment of money) to claim that they were personal friends & wanted to donate their organs to that person.
I can see how it might be possible to make an exception for blood relatives, but I think it would need to be carefully worded & controlled.
no subject
no subject
Presumably the NHS take that into account? I'm fine if they decide to prioritise based on likelihood of success, but that should be independent of whether the person wants it to go to a family member or not.
no subject
Firstly, because who gets 'spare parts' should be determined solely by need (imho) - the *two* people who received this girl's kidneys needed them *now*, whereas the mother wasn't in the same urgent need and can continue to wait (presumably on dialysis, but still alive)
Secondly, because what is to stop someone 'suggesting' that someone "dies faster" or refuses treatment or other non-voluntary euthanasia-type pressures. I massively dislike this "saviour babies" thing of breeding solely to get a cure for a sibling, being able to determine where your bits went after you die is open to the same sort of abuse, with death being the factor rather than life.
no subject
I feel the main possible points in favour are (a) as a matter of principle, one might believe that people should have a say in how their organs are used, and (b) would implementing a system encourage more people to donate (or would not doing so cause existing donors to stop donating)?
If it's done at all, it should certainly be limited to named recipients, to avoid the "only be given to a white person" problem that
no subject
I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of a donor being able to give a preference as to who should receive his/her organs. It should go on medical need.
no subject
You may have a relative you love dearly, you may be dying, and that person may need, say a new heart, but if that person is in his/her sixties, well, it doesn't matter if they're in great shape and might otherwise live for a few more decades, a younger person is going to get a heart and they're not. What if I want to save my relative. Currently there is no way for anyone to donate a vital organ to someone who is considered unacceptable for transplants. You can donate non-vital organs, because you can do that while alive, but not vital organs. But what if I truly think someone deemed insufficiently worthy is worthy and I'm dying...
no subject
no subject
1) she didn't fill in the forms
2) There are probably people worse off than her mother.
no subject
Prioritising the relative would provide a real dilemma in cases where intervention was a matter of a family decision.
no subject
There is no obligation to leave your wealth to the poorest person...
no subject
No, but we do require wealthy people to pay a significant proportion of their estate in inheritance tax, which at least in theory is used for the good of the community as a whole (I realise the execution is deficient.) I also think one important difference between organ donation and financial legacies is that the latter require negligible public resources (which are more than offset by the tax), whereas organ donation requires considerable resources from a health service that is already stretched. It seems important to me that as far as possible, the allocation of communal resources should be prioritised by need and likely outcome.
Organs for Organ Donors
In the United States, it's legal to donate your organs to specified individuals. If you'd like to donate your organs to other registered organ donors who will return the favor, please join LifeSharers at www.lifesharers.org.
Giving your organs to other organ donors makes the organ transplant system fairer. About 50% of the organs transplanted in the United States go to people who haven't agreed to donate their own organs when they die.
no subject
One thing people haven't commented on so far is how spectacularly more complex the organ donation system would have to become to manage a system where people get to freely specify who should get their organs.
With a dead person's property it's more straightforward, since transfer isn't as complex and demanding a process as an organ transplant - and yet to accommodate the entire spectrum of people's wishes requires an entire speciality of the legal profession. If you have to deal with all that (or even something approaching that) on top of the usual administrative faff of transplants, I can see the successful transplant rate falling through the floor.
(There's some good evidence that the law on organ donation - opt-in or opt-out - makes a huge difference to the number of technically available donors but far less to the number of actual successful transplants. The big effects in the latter come rather from investing in streamlining the administrative process of decision-making, allocation, matching, transport and so on.)