Tag Archives: organ transplantation

January 22, 2012, 12:11 am

Transplant Rules Are Out of Touch With Reality

This post responds to my reader, Chuck Kleinhans, who asked for a follow-up to my previous post: Too Disabled For An Organ Transplant, which ran last week. Chuck wanted to know a little more about the 1984 National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA).

The National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) was enacted in 1984. It is the first federal organ transplant law. Prior to that time, states organized their own organ transplant rules and they worked! The Uniform Anatomical Gift Act (UAGA) was enacted in all states, which means that states preserved their autonomy, but strove for consistency and uniformity with regard to organ transplant rules. The UAGA was first adopted in 1968 and was revised in 1987 in accordance with NOTA.

In short, NOTA limits all contributions to the U.S. organ supply pool to organs that are altruistically supplied. In other words, it prohibits any “valuable…

January 20, 2012, 1:46 pm

Too Disabled for an Organ Transplant?

By Michele Goodwin

Organ transplant politics are once again in the news. Most recently, a parent, Chrissy Rivera, alleged that Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has refused to perform a kidney transplant for her child. She claims that hospital officials turned down performing the transplant because staff referred to her child as “mentally retarded” and questioned the value of implanting the organ into a child with such severe mental and physical disabilities. According to her, hospital officials expressed concern about the quality of life benefit to the child as well as whether the family (and later the child) would have the means to sustain the medication regimen necessary to avoid organ rejection. Inherent in these concerns are financial consideration as anti-rejection medication costs can be exorbitant.

The 3-year-old child, Amelia Rivera, was born with Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome, a rare…