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Gift-of-life? The Psychosocial Experiences of Heart, Liver and Kidney Recipients

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Bioethics Beyond Altruism

Abstract

Organ transplantation is firmly embedded within gift-of-life discourse, which holds the potential to prescribe the transplant experience , and recipients’ moral reckoning of it. This is arguably no more so than where recipients, having received the scarce and precious gift-of-life , live in constant awareness that they are being scrutinised and judged as to their worthiness of the gift. This chapter is based on qualitative research conducted in Australia with heart, liver and kidney recipients . Rather than treating the experiences of organ transplant recipients as homogeneous, I suggest that differing emotional and social values are ascribed to organs by transplant recipients, and the particular organ received is powerfully consequential for the psychosocial experience of transplantation and the ways in which recipients make meaning of their experience.

We are left to invent a new way of being human where bodily parts go into each other’s bodies, redesigning the landscape of boundaries in the habit of what we are so definitively used to call (sic) distinct bodies … My life in its contingency mirrors the history of techniques, the growing know-how about human bodies, which knows nothing about the lived-bodies that can and will come from it. (Varela 2001: 260–261)

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  1. Murdoch University, Perth, WA, Australia

    Geraldine O’Brien

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  1. Geraldine O’Brien
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Correspondence to Geraldine O’Brien .

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  1. Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

    Rhonda M Shaw

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O’Brien, G. (2017). Gift-of-life? The Psychosocial Experiences of Heart, Liver and Kidney Recipients. In: Shaw, R. (eds) Bioethics Beyond Altruism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55532-4_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55532-4_9

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-55531-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-55532-4

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