The Pros And Cons Of Organ Donation

874 Words4 Pages

In the United States, organ donation has traditionally relied on pure altruism and the encouragement of “sharing the gift of life.” However, this alone has been unsuccessful at meeting the increasing demands of those needing an organ transplant. As a result, there are many lives that are lost each year due to the lack of organ donors. As a means of finding a solution to this issue, there have been many proposals in order to increase the supply of organs. A shared solution seems to be offering economic incentives to increase the supply of organs donations. By offering financial incentives, research has hypothesized that organ transplants would increase substantially. Hence decreasing the number of deaths every year by saving the lives of those in need of a …show more content…

The National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) of 1984 that’s purpose is to “encourage organ donation and to improve procedures for efficient organ procurement leading to successful transplantation” (Reidler, Berkowitz, Booth, Cramer, & Klein, 2012) criminalizes the enactment of such proposal. While this conceptual argument is undoubtedly debunked by law, it remains a viable option in increasing organ transplants. In fact, there are many studies that propose this idea several different ways. One includes that NOTA’s section 301’s proscription, “should not prohibit state-government programs providing reasonable incentives for organ donation” (Satel, Morrison, & Jones, 2014). Nevertheless, if indeed a market of organ commerce existed, there would be many ethical dilemmas to consider. In this paper, I will be discussing some of the ethical principles regarding an argument favoring financial