Organ and Tissue Donation

Abstract

This chapter begins with a discussion of organ donation and transplantation as a ‘gift of life’. Use of the ‘gift of life’ metaphor is commonplace in jurisdictions where the sale of body tissue and organs is illegal. In the social sciences and bioethics, however, it has been subject to scrutiny over the course of the last two decades (Fox and Swazey 1992; Gerrand 1994; Healy 2006; Shaw 2008a; Siminoff and Chillag 1999; Tutton 2002, 2004). As Waldby and Mitchell (2006) point out, discussion about the transfer of bodily matter as gifts has been greatly complicated by both the introduction of new medical technologies and the movement of organs and tissue across geographical and national boundaries as part of global economies of exchange. Despite the increasing globalisation and circulation of bodily matter, people, and services, and the critique of gift rhetoric by scholars working in this area (see Healy 2006; Tutton 2004), the ‘gift of life’ metaphor remains the dominant way of framing organ transplantation in the media, on stakeholder websites, and in institutional brochures and information leaflets promoting donative acts.