Nearly 100,000 people in the United States are on waiting lists for kidneys, hearts, livers, lungs, and other organs. Many of these people die each day because the demand for organs greatly exceeds the supply, and the disparity is widening.
Throughout its history, the Hastings Center has played a prominent role in developing ethically sound strategies for expanding the organ supply, including recommendations that lead all 50 states to require hospital representatives to discuss organ donation with families of patients declared brain dead. But despite these laws and other strategies, such as organ donation cards, the organ shortage remains. Some people favor changing the federal law to permit people to buy and sell organs. But this approach is fraught with ethical problems, including the risk that only the desperately poor would be induced—and possibly coerced--to sell their body parts.