Conditional donation: Is it justifiable to have different policies for different kinds of tissue?

The question of whether donors should be able to set conditions on who can receive their tissue has been discussed by bioethicists, but so far there has been little consideration of whether the answer to this question should be different depending on the type of tissue under discussion. In this arti...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Clinical ethics 2023-12, Vol.18 (4), p.375-384
Main Authors: Jenkins, Simon Paul, Moorlock, Greg
Format: Article
Language:English
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The question of whether donors should be able to set conditions on who can receive their tissue has been discussed by bioethicists, but so far there has been little consideration of whether the answer to this question should be different depending on the type of tissue under discussion. In this article, we compare the donation of organs with the donation of reproductive material such as sperm, eggs, and embryos, exploring possible arguments for allowing donors to set conditions in one case but not the other. After considering arguments from procreative liberty, special parental obligations, and donors meeting their genetic offspring, we find that there is no ethically defensible reason to have different policies between these two cases. As a consequence, we conclude that jurisdictions operating with this inconsistency should consider moving their policies into better alignment. We also make some recommendations for the standardisation of the terminology around conditional donation.
ISSN:1477-7509
1758-101X
DOI:10.1177/14777509221144414