The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
– Are there limits? –
Few organs remain technically non-transplantable. But two are excluded, for now, due to their raising of ethical eyebrows — the testes and ovaries.
“A testicle transplant would amount to assisted reproduction in disguise,” said Bastien.
One question is this: If the recipient fathers children with his new sperm-producing testicles, whose offspring are they — his, or the donor’s?
The same issue arises in the case of a head transplant onto a male body.
A paper last year in the Journal of Medical Ethics urged a rethink of risk-benefit ratio of non life-saving organ transplants.
“The greatest risk transplant recipients face comes from the powerful but noxious agents, immunosuppressives, which must be used to keep transplanted organs from being rejected,” wrote Arthur Caplan and Duncan Purves.
A long list of possible side effects — including cancer — can be justified for a heart or lung transplant, they argued, but possibly less so for a new face, hand or penis.
“The shift away from saving lives to seeking to make them better requires a shift in the ethical thinking that has long formed the foundation of organ transplantation,” the duo argued.
