Mass. Democrats Propose Turning Prisoners into Organ Farms
Originally published at National ReviewThe organ shortage has stimulated a host of unethical ideas to increase the supply, such as live-harvesting persistently unconscious or consenting people as a form of euthanasia.
Here’s another: induce incarcerated prisoners to “donate” marrow or other tissue with the promise of a reduced sentence.
Here’s but part of Bill 3822, co-sponsored by Representative Carlos González and several other Democrats:
Section 170. (a) The Commissioner of the Department of Corrections shall establish a Bone Marrow and Organ Donation Program within the Department of Correction and a Bone Marrow and Organ Donation Committee. The Bone Marrow and Organ Donation Program shall allow eligible incarcerated individuals to gain not less than 60 and not more than 365 day reduction in the length of their committed sentence in Department of Corrections facilities, or House of Correction facilities if they are serving a Department of Correction sentence in a House of Corrections facility, on the condition that the incarcerated individual has donated bone marrow or organ(s).
No. This is a horrible and unethical idea. Prisoners should not be deemed an exploitable caste.
The law prohibits organ selling for a reason — the poor will be the ones selling, and it opens the door to terrible exploitation. Granting reduced sentences would be a form of organ buying.
Similarly, we don’t generally allow prisoners to be human subjects in medical experiments — unless it is aimed at explicitly benefiting the prison population or the like. Why? Again, because of terrible past abuses and the high risk of rank exploitation.
This proposal suffers from the same fatal ethical flaw. Prisoners are hardly in an equal bargaining position. Nor should they be induced to turn themselves into a natural resource ripe for the harvest. That should not be a potential consequence of incarceration, regardless of our understandable desire to increase the number of transplantable organs.