Using a human being for "spare parts"

[Necroid]

It's from a book I just read, actually. The story is that a cuple has a child with
Lukemia. If you don't know what that is, you can check out this link: http://health.yahoo.com/ency/healthwise/tv7433
Basically, it's blood cancer. To be treated for Lukemia, a person might require quite a lot of transplants.
Unfortunatly, in the story there are no compatible donors for this child. So the parents decide to have another child, which will be slightly gene-modified, so that she is a perfect match for her sister.
As soon as she's born, they start using her as a donor. This continues until she's 13, and by that time she has allready given the following:

Cord blood
Lymphocytes, tree times.
Bone marrow
Granulocytes
and peripheral blood stem cells

The reason this stops is because the girl no longer wants to be used for spare parts. When her parents want her to donate a kidney, she says no.
She actually sues her parents for the right to her own body. Ofcourse, if she stops being a donor, her sister will die.

What's you'r opinion on this? Asuming it was real, who would you suport?
Do you feal that she should be forced to donate, or that she should get to decide what happens to her body.

[SirNitram]

It's a barbaric, idiotic chariacture of real procedures being researched. Frankly, I don't think it's defensible to grow a human for spare parts, especially if you're forcing them to donate. If you had a pair of twins and one offered to the other.. Wonderful. Awesome. But as described, this is reprehensible.

Thankfully, real research into cloning organs and regenerating them doesn't require such.

[Darth Wong]

OK, who on Earth would actually approve of forced organ donations? I can't imagine this thread leading to an actual argument, since that would require someone to agree with the forced donations.

[Flagg]

Wasn't there a case like this where parents had another child as a bone marrow donor for an older sibling (or something along those lines) a few year ago?

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

Well, I don't think this would be right because the individual who was "grown" is a conciously aware being, which means it can suffer. If you are using it for parts, and that treatement is involuntary, you might as well be torturing one person so that another person can keep living.

By forcing the organ donation, especially over such long periods of time, you are extending the torture to an unlimited timeframe. There is a lot of foreboading, the child knows what's going to happen, and the donee, if it knows, will also probably feel horrible that the family is using her/his sister as a meat factory. That's not very Utilitarian.

In the end, I think that the suffering and mental anguish of the daughter outweighs the life of the other person, but I think the daughter should be encouraged to help her sister. Forcing seems to defeat the purpouse, since it causes more or at least equal suffering to end suffering.


From a Deontological point of view, you would also be using one human as a means to the end of another human. Even if you do grow the human for a specific purpouse, if it's sapient, or at least sentient, then it's a moral person and has human value, and thus you would be treating it not as a end itself, but a means.


The only way I think this would be moral would be if the scenario were changed and the being was no longer an rationally autonomous, sentien being, or if not doing so would cause the deaths of many, many more people, and there was no alternative.

[Captain tycho]

Besides the digusting ethical ramifications of using another another human being for spare parts, fairly soon we'll be able to grow organs for a specific individual.

[Plekhanov]

Wasn't there a case like this where parents had another child as a bone marrow donor for an older sibling (or something along those lines) a few year ago?

I seem to recall a case that got lots of ‘designer babies’ stuff going in the media where parents had possible embryos for their next child (which they were going to have anyway) screened so that it would be able to donate stem cells from the umbilical cord to it's older sibling, maybe that’s the case you're thinking of.

[Zero]

That just seems sick... a person obviously deserves consideration aas a person if they have the ability to object to the things they're being forced to do anyways.

[Flagg]

Wasn't there a case like this where parents had another child as a bone marrow donor for an older sibling (or something along those lines) a few year ago?

I seem to recall a case that got lots of ‘designer babies’ stuff going in the media where parents had possible embryos for their next child (which they were going to have anyway) screened so that it would be able to donate stem cells from the umbilical cord to it's older sibling, maybe that’s the case you're thinking of.

No, it was something on Dateline where they didn;t even question the morality of doing it, but rather treated it as a "these parents love their kid so much" stories. I'll have to look for it.

[Kazuaki Shimazaki]

The reason this stops is because the girl no longer wants to be used for spare parts. When her parents want her to donate a kidney, she says no. She actually sues her parents for the right to her own body. Ofcourse, if she stops being a donor, her sister will die.

What's you'r opinion on this? Asuming it was real, who would you suport?
Do you feal that she should be forced to donate, or that she should get to decide what happens to her body.

Under such a scenario, a very simplistic view of utilitarianism might support the forced removal of one (not too essential; you can get by with one instead of two) kidney for a life. It is, however, likely that the older sister would constantly require more and more "spare parts".

It is, however, hard to imagine parents that love one more than the other so much that they would freely force one to keep giving to the other. Not to mention the older one can't be feeling too good from this prolonged leukemia even if she thinks it is justifiable to use her sister as replacement part fodder. It is more merciful to just let the older one die.

[wilfulton]

Think of it this way, if your parents started chopping you up into spare parts for your sibling whose body is unable to maintain itself in the world of the living, how would you feel? There is nothing wrong with self preservation, that is a biological imperative. Notice that species whose members are so altruistic that they will freely chop up their own bodies to sustain others' doomed existences didn't come very far along in the evolutionary chain.

[Psycho Smiley]

Wasn't there a case like this where parents had another child as a bone marrow donor for an older sibling (or something along those lines) a few year ago?

I saw that program too. Link here.

Marissa had no choice -- she was just 14 months old.

Just think of the mind-fuck that's going to give that kid later in life. "Yeah, we mainly had you in hope of getting a donor for our other kid." What the hell were they going to tell her if she wasn't a match?

When I ran a search for that story, I came up with this, too (probably what Plekhanov was talking about). Bad enough having a kid in hopes that they might save a sibling, this one's embryo was selected specifically for the task.

[wolveraptor]

*snip*

That's not true. Colonial insects regularly sacrifice themselves for the good of the colony or nest. Think about what a mother penguin or octopus will do for her young. When directed properly, toward young or more useful individuals, altruism is evolutionarily advantageous. [/nitpick]

God save the friggin queen, baby.

[Argosh]

Have any of you seen 'The Island'(http://imdb.com/title/tt0399201/)? Sick (and rich) let themselves be cloned and the clone is later used for 'parts'.

[Flagg]

Wasn't there a case like this where parents had another child as a bone marrow donor for an older sibling (or something along those lines) a few year ago?

I saw that program too. Link here.

Marissa had no choice -- she was just 14 months old.

Just think of the mind-fuck that's going to give that kid later in life. "Yeah, we mainly had you in hope of getting a donor for our other kid." What the hell were they going to tell her if she wasn't a match?

When I ran a search for that story, I came up with this, too (probably what Plekhanov was talking about). Bad enough having a kid in hopes that they might save a sibling, this one's embryo was selected specifically for the task.

Awesome, thanks. I must be search engine retarded because I couldn't find it at all.

[wolveraptor]

What makes you think they'll ever tell Marissa why they had her? I sure as hell wouldn't, and unlike adoption, there's no reason the truth must ever come out.

[Psycho Smiley]

What makes you think they'll ever tell Marissa why they had her?

It's been all over the news, the whole family knows... she's probably going to find out eventually.

[Son of the Suns]

OK, who on Earth would actually approve of forced organ donations? I can't imagine this thread leading to an actual argument, since that would require someone to agree with the forced donations.

The actual argument comes in when you ask these two questions:

Is it ethical to genetically modify and grow human beings for the sole purpose of donating to another person, and

Should parents have the right to make the decision to donate their children's organs. In the OP the scenario was that the child was old enough to object once it came to actual organ donation, but what if the children are both to young to make that decision or understand what is going on?




Personally, I object to the idea of human genetic alteration except if it is to correct some disorder in that child. I also object to the idea of organ donation by children until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves.

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

Also, why would someone wastefully clone an entire new person rather than the organ itself? Our science is to the point we can clone organs and tissues without needing a whole organism.

I seriously hope tissue/organ cloning will be the death knell for idiotic plots like The Island.

[wolveraptor]

All I know is Scarlet Johansson is hot.

But more on topic: I feel that before a child is competant to make a decision about organ donation, the parents should have the right to make the decision, much like the Terry Schiavo case (spouse has right to confirm euthanasia, etc.).

[Durandal]

It's a barbaric, idiotic chariacture of real procedures being researched. Frankly, I don't think it's defensible to grow a human for spare parts, especially if you're forcing them to donate. If you had a pair of twins and one offered to the other.. Wonderful. Awesome. But as described, this is reprehensible.

Thankfully, real research into cloning organs and regenerating them doesn't require such.

Precisely. That's why I absolutely refused to see The Island, as it's yet another insane, anti-cloning propaganda piece that makes no fucking sense.

Why the fuck would anyone want to pay for a human clone to just take spare parts from when he can just have the parts he needs grown when they are needed? Raising a human and keeping him healthy costs money. And once you actually do have a need for a part from the clone, the clone's health deteriorates, making him much less useful for future donations. Say you take a lung from your clone. Great, now you've got a one-lunged clone with a severe oxygen deficiency in his blood. Yeah, he'll be really useful for spare parts a year or two down the road.

Or what if you need a new heart or liver? Take it from your clone, sure. But surprise, you've just paid money to grow, raise, feed and care for an entire human being only to kill him for his heart. This when you could've just had a new heart grown from your own healthy cells on the spot for a tiny fraction of the cost and none of the guilt.

Not only does this idiotic "humans for spare parts" idea unethical, but it's a piss-poor investment, too. The only reason someone would ever do it would be because he's an evil super-villain, the kind you find in bad Summer action flicks that barely manage to recover their exorbitant production costs and lose out to penguin documentaries at the box office.

[WyrdNyrd]

AFAIK, it is much more difficult to clone an individual organ than to clone an entire human. It's a false analogy to say otherwise, like saying "it's easier to make just a hubcap than it is to make a whole car, therefore..."

To clone an entire organism, you "only" need to inject a donor nucleus into a different cell, and if you do this 10,000 times you might get 2 or three semi-viable organisms.

But how do you even start cloning just one organ? And how do you keep it alive without the rest of the organism supporting it? This may all be theoretically possible, but its even more difficult than whole-organism cloning.

So, while neither technology is viable yet, there may very well be a time when when whole-cloning + harvesting is a possibility, whereas single-organ-cloning is still a pipe dream.

Forcing us to consider this scenario, rather than simply writing it off.

[Son of the Suns]

Also, why would someone wastefully clone an entire new person rather than the organ itself? Our science is to the point we can clone organs and tissues without needing a whole organism.

I seriously hope tissue/organ cloning will be the death knell for idiotic plots like The Island.

We aren't quite there yet.