How to Encourage More People to Donate Their Organs

1) Many of the people who receive organs have self-damaged their own organs such as by drug use or other irresponsible behaviors (eating patterns, sexual activity patterns, etc. ). There are measures taken by the medical community to ensure that they’re not engaged in these behaviors while they’re waiting for an organ but that doesn’t change the history of the behaviors or how the damage was done. 2) Most of the people will have shortened lifeps anyway even if they receive the organ. ) Most of the people who receive organs will experience an array of complications which will reduce their quality of life and impose ongoing, often lifelong, financial costs. 4) The immediate and ongoing costs of transplanting organs is very high and that cost can often be spent better in other ways such as by improving health education and prevention, drug addiction treatment, neonatal care, nutrition, genetic research, artificial tissue research, etc. 5) Because of the high costs involved, organ transplants are sometimes received via a black market in which you have the very rich benefiting and the very poor selling their organs.
This discrepancy in access would, to some extent, remain even if everyone were an organ donor. 6) Some people are afraid that less than full efforts might be made to resuscitate them if they are a known organ donor. For example, they’re involved in an accident and then after brief efforts are made to resuscitate them they are left to die and their organs harvested even though if someone had tried a little harder they’d be alive. Although this fear is basically unfounded at least in the majority of the developed world, it is not entirely an unreasonable fear and it would have some legitimacy in some parts of the world. ) Many people regard the body as sacred in such a way that we can never be morally obligated to part with any part of it or to receive any part of anothers. In fact some people strengthen this view from “not obligated” to “obligated to not”, and there are a range of views in between. This sense of the “sacredness” of the body need not manifest in any specifically religious way but simply as a visceral repugnance at the thought of disrupting ones ordinary bodily organization even after death.
However it may manifest in religious ways as well and is why so many cultures have engaged in ritual entombment, mummification and embalming, and frown upon things like grave-robbing, cremation, etc. The intuition is, more or less, that when you violate the body, even in death, you show a disrespect both for the life of the person whose body it was and for life in general by making us all merely potential commodities for one another. This ties in with point 5. The converse of this comes at the beginning rather than the end of life and involves not the action of selling organs but of selling children and of conceiving children specifically for the purpose of harvesting their organs. These things actually do and have happened and, quite reasonably, they repulse many people.

8) The donater is usually unable to exercise any discretion as to who receives the organ or judge their merit to receive it. 9) The donater is usually totally unaware of the recipient and feels no obligation to them. This lack of felt obligation is, of course, reciprocated. 0) Although, just as with vaccination programs, the costs of donation could be lowered by making it mandatory, this is very unlikely to happen (see 7) and, if it did happen, would be very likely to be abused (see 5). Together these all provide formidable reasons to not donate. Although there may remain some cases to which some of the arguments don’t equally apply, such as cornea transplants and skin grafts and transplants for the young and otherwise healthy and donations to those you know, the arguments against many forms of donation and many cases thereof are still weightier than you might think.