Conditional donation: Is it justifiable to have different policies for different kinds of tissue?

Abstract

The question of whether donors should be able to set conditions on who can receive their tissue has been discussed by bioethicists, but so far there has been little consideration of whether the answer to this question should be different depending on the type of tissue under discussion. In this article, we compare the donation of organs with the donation of reproductive material such as sperm, eggs, and embryos, exploring possible arguments for allowing donors to set conditions in one case but not the other. After considering arguments from procreative liberty, special parental obligations, and donors meeting their genetic offspring, we find that there is no ethically defensible reason to have different policies between these two cases. As a consequence, we conclude that jurisdictions operating with this inconsistency should consider moving their policies into better alignment. We also make some recommendations for the standardisation of the terminology around conditional donation.