Organ Donation : Supply, Policies & Practices

The issue of living organ donation is important because it represents one important set of possibilities for balancing the needs of people seeking organs with one another, and with the needs of potential organ donors. On one side of the balance, the drive to increase the supply of transplantable organs is fueled by people awaiting organ transplants. They are, in a sense, competing with one another on waiting lists for potentially life-saving scarce resources. On the other side of the balance, the drive to ensure that the transplant system is ethical and equitable precludes some mechanisms that would increase the supply of transplantable organs. Some options that have been rejected to date in the United States include paying healthy persons to donate their organs, and mandating that transplantable organs be harvested from all cadavers. To maintain the most ideal balance for the organ transplantation system, Congress may now wish to clarify whether certain new types of living organ donation should be adopted to increase the supply of transplantable organs, or prohibited for ethical and/or equitable reasons.