![\"Balance\"](\"http:\/\/s.wsj.net\/media\/balance_art_200_20080805130556.jpg\")
Paying donors of tissue or organs can help sick people by driving up supply. But creating a market for human parts is an ethically slippery proposition. <\/p>\nPaying donors of tissue or organs can help sick people by driving up supply. But creating a market for human parts is an ethically slippery proposition. <\/p>\n
In this country, it’s legal to compensate donors of eggs, sperm and blood, but it’s illegal to pay organ donors. Compensating donors of bone marrow<\/a> — which is sometimes removed from the bone itself, but more often taken from the donor’s blood — is also illegal. But a lawsuit<\/a> in federal court is challenging that ban and seeking to launch a pilot compensation program.<\/p>\n Offering marrow donors scholarships or housing stipends could mean better outcomes for patients with diseases such as leukemia. And, since bone marrow grows back after it’s donated, it makes sense for the law to treat marrow donation more like blood or sperm donation rather than kidney donation, a doctor and a lawyer argue this morning on the New York Times op-ed page<\/a>.<\/p>\n But the National Marrow Donor Program<\/a> has argued that paying donors might compromise safety.<\/p>\n “Offering compensation to potential donors might compel them to withhold important personal health information that would negatively impact the patient,” the group said in a statement to American Medical News<\/a>, which reported on the lawsuit last month. “The safety of the donors is equally important. Offering compensation to potential donors might also compel them to withhold personal health information that would normally defer them from donating.”<\/p>\n Health Blog Question of the Day<\/strong>: Should bone marrow donors be compensated?<\/p>\n Image: iStockphoto<\/em><\/p>\n Paying donors of tissue or organs can help sick people by driving up supply. But creating a market for human parts is an ethically slippery proposition. In this country, it’s legal to compensate donors of eggs, sperm and blood, but it’s illegal to pay organ donors. Compensating donors of bone marrow — which is sometimes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":650,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-154545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/650"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154545\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/img><\/a>
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