Alisa Harris of Patrol Magazine is worried that liberals are giving living organ donors a hard time. After all, in her blog post entitled “A Noble Form of Cannibalism”, a phrase borrowed from Leon Kass’ scholarship on organ donation, Harris starts out criticizing the medical establishment (and implicitly the bioethicists who shape the organ donation policy within it) who support such draconian policies as “donors have to cover their own medical expenses* for the donation and then insurance provides nothing later for long-term comprehensive health insurance or life and disability insurance.”
She goes on to slam the medical community for being “overly cautious because of the possibility of bribes or rewards for living organ donation.” I mean, what’s wrong with buying someone’s liver or kidney? She goes on to quote another columnist, Frances Kissling of Salon: “Even without incentives, no group of do-gooders is treated with more suspicion by the medical community.”
But wait, I have to go back to this whole “cannibalism” metaphor Harris (and Kass) have used. The entire idea that living organ donation is likened to cannibalism does carry moral weight–as most metaphors do. If living organ donation is as serious an act to be likened to something like cannibalism, then ought it not be viewed with caution, given serious legal and ethical protection, both to the donor and recipient? Of course, living organ donation is NOT cannibalism–it is legal and morally accepted in our society–but to the extent that it presents risks to the donor and is literally the taking of one person’s flesh by another persons that act must be respected and protected.
Harris doesn’t really say enough to be critical of in either direction, either about Christian notions of organ donation or transplantation, or about either Leon Kass or Gil Meilaender (her favorite bioethicist, she says). But before you slam the medical community or non-Christians, or implicitly bioethicists or those more liberal than you for putting protections in place for those who want to be living donors, think about your chosen metaphors and ask yourself if there isn’t more than just moral complexity or thorny questions, but real harms out there from which these policies are protecting actual people from.
Summer Johnson, PhD