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Allotransplantation Ethics

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Xenotransplantation

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Abstract

The clinical and personal importance of allotransplantation clearly shows it is one of the great triumphs of medicine; its tragedy, as this chapter demonstrates, is that demand outstrips supply and the COVID-19 pandemic has made the global shortfall far worse. Living and deceased donations are both important. The main ways of increasing living donation are relaxing criteria for donation, offering incentives, either financial or medical, and increasing the range of potential recipients, especially through social media. Deceased donations either following circulatory death or brain death, require consent from relatives in most cases, even if the wishes of the deceased have been clearly expressed. The pros and cons of opt-out systems are discussed, along with the idea of abolishing the ‘dead donor rule’ to obtain more organs. Transplant systems operate fundamentally on public trust and if this is lost, donations decrease. As demand for organs looks set to increase, alternatives to allotransplantation will be increasingly needed.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Except in the rare circumstances of ‘domino donations’.

  2. 2.

    Previously referred to as donation after cardiac death or ‘non-heart-beating’ donors.

  3. 3.

    Previously referred to as ‘beating-heart’ donors.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Scottish Council on Human Bioethics, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

    Trevor Stammers

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  1. Trevor Stammers
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Correspondence to Trevor Stammers .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Family Medicine, Rowan-Virtua School of Osteopathic Medicine, Stratford, NJ, USA

    Daniel J. Hurst

  2. Department of Epidemiology, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, USA

    Luz Padilla

  3. Department of Social Work (Emeritus), Abilene Christian University, Abilene, TX, USA

    Wayne D. Paris

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Stammers, T. (2023). Allotransplantation Ethics. In: Hurst, D.J., Padilla, L., Paris, W.D. (eds) Xenotransplantation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29071-8_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29071-8_2

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