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Transparent Vessels?: What Organ Donors Should Be Allowed to Know about Their Recipients

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Richard H. Dees
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After a long search, Jonathan has finally found someone willing to donate a kidney to him and thereby free him from dialysis. Meredith is Jonathan's second cousin, and she considers herself a generous person, so although she barely knows Jonathan, she is willing to help. However, as Meredith learns more about the donation process, she begins to ask questions about Jonathan: “Is he HIV positive? I heard he got it using drugs. Has he been in jail? He's already had one live donor, so what happened to the first kidney? Did he forget to take his drugs or something?” The transplant center must, then, decide if Meredith is, in fact, entitled to answers to these kinds of questions. According to the Consensus Statement on the Live Organ Donor, “It is incumbent on the transplant center to provide full and accurate disclosure to potential donors of all pertinent information regarding risk and benefit to the donor and recipient.” But whether answers to the Meredith's questions count as “pertinent information regarding the risk and benefit” is the issue at hand.

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Independent
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , Spring 2013 , pp. 323 - 332
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2013

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References

In my example, the donor is female and the recipient is male, and for clarity, I will refer to the generic donor as female and the generic recipient as male. While the points of the paper obviously apply to donors and recipients of either gender, my choice is not random: about 60 percent of live donors are female, and about 60 percent of recipients of live donations are male. See Organ Procurement and Transplant Network (OPTN), OPTN/SRTR Annual Report 2010, at Tables 2.9, 5.4d available at <http://srtr.transplant.hrsa.gov/> (last visited February 22, 2013).+(last+visited+February+22,+2013).>Google Scholar
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