Essay about Organ Transplantation and Ethical Considerations

Organ Transplantation and Ethical Considerations In February 2003, 17-year-old Jesica Santillan received a heart-lung transplant at Duke University Hospital that went badly awry because, by mistake, doctors used donor organs from a patient with a different blood type. The botched operation and subsequent unsuccessful retransplant opened a discussion in the media, in internet chat rooms, and in ethicists circles regarding how we, in the United States, allocate the scarce commodity of organs for transplant. How do we go about allocating a future for people who will die without a transplant? How do we go about denying it? When so many are waiting for their shot at a life worth living, is it fair to grant multiple organs or multiple†¦show more content†¦First, lets address equality as it applies to justice. All other things being equal, who holds a claim to the organs available for transplant in the United States—just citizens, or illegal immigrants, too? A recent Chicago news source cited the tragedy of American taxpay ers and their children who died last year waiting for the transplant that Duke University Hospital chose to give to a citizen of a foreign nation (Bailey, 2). This article went on to state that our system rewards illegal aliens for entering the United States to access our health care system, thus condemning some of the American taxpayers who pay for that system to premature deaths. Few could deny the sheer unfairness of such a situation (Bailey, 2). But how true are these statements? Are organs allocated in a way that promotes inequality for American citizens? An ethicists first responsibility is to look at the facts, and the facts in this instance tell a different story. According to the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), American citizens are more likely to receive organs of non-citizens than vice versa; As a percentage, every year, U.S. citizens receive more organs than they donate (Vedantam, 2). 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