Incentives For Organ Donation Essay

The guiding principle of living organ donation in India is rarely altruism: most organs are donated to save the lives of family members, not strangers, and thus, not based on purely selfless motives; a regulated system of incentives may therefore be the best solution to increasing organ donation. Wen points to a system adopted successfully in 2010 by Israel, where patients who have made donations (or have signed up for donation), or have family members who have donated organs, get priority in receiving organs. However, Sharp points out that several critics argue that any kind of incentives for organ "donation" are forms of commerce and "offering forms of rewarded gifting to surviving kin in the form of estate and income tax incentives and assistance

Take the case of my friend’s father who has kidney disease and who 's mother has agreed to donate a kidney. If this act is viewed as morally correct, then how can it be unethical for a poor man to sell his kidney to help take care of his child? Nagral and Amalorpavanathan, say that in India "since the recipient and the hospital performing the transplant are beneficiaries of the donation, it has been argued that there is no reason why the act should not be acknowledged and compensated in some form, especially since the recipient is often a rich person" Sharp warns of the risks in adopting Western systems in other countries and says the experience in Egypt "exposes the myopia of universalist thinking within medical ethics, as framed by Western models". On the other hand, one could say that the poor who decide to sell body parts are doing so not out their own “free will” but are coerced by their extreme poverty and therefore allowing such trade is exploiting them. Nagral and Amalorpavanathan themselves acknowledge that "offering fixed cash payment can be considered an unacceptable pressure on poor families to give consent, when many of them might refuse if the reward were not