Increasing organ donations

The bureaucracy in New Zealand seems determined to keep organ donations at a woefully low level. They even argue that the rights of relatives should trump the rights of the deceased who has consented to donate organs.

Now some countries have managed to increase the rates of organ donation. Israel has had a 68% increase in organ donations after they put in place a policy to give donors 40 days lost wages, plus expenses. The number of people who died on the organ waiting list dropped from 124 to 105.

Israel has also said those who sign up to become organ donors, will themselves be given priority if they find themselves in need of an organ. A great way to increase the number of donors and save lives.

Iran, not normally a country you cite for good policy, they eliminated their waiting list for kidneys in 1999 – 11 years after they allowed organ vending. The donors receive up to $4,500 for being a donor – either from the recipient, or if they are poor from a charitable trust.

So what is the attitude of NZ officials. John McCall is on the National Ethics Advisory Council and Critic reports him saying:

McCall strongly opposes the idea behind LifeSharers, describing it as “absolutely abhorrent. We don’t discriminate on what treatment is offered to people based on their beliefs or what they may or may not have been willing to do under different circumstances.”

Eric Cramption notes:

But he’d be willing to discriminate against those donors who prefer that their organs go to organ donors.

McCall on organ markets says:

“I find the idea of organ markets abhorrent. Where commerce has had things to do with organ donation, terrible things happen. If you make it legal it’s still open to exploitation, and I think trading organs for money is fundamentally ethically untenable. The people who are most exploited by that tend to be the poor.”

The terrible things that have happened are more people get organs, and stay alive. The price of McCall’s ethical views being forced on us is people die.

Crampton notes:

I wouldn’t much care if he found LifeSharers repugnant if it were just his personal opinion; I find it repugnant that some folks are willing to accept donor organs but refuse to be donors themselves, but that’s a value judgment. But it puzzles me a bit what set of ethics gets used to decide that his ethics should trump mine. His abhorrence gets to set policy. Lovely.

Exactly. And again, the price of such repugnance is people dying because we do not have enough organ donors. I find unnecessary deaths repugnant.,