Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly Volume 40 Article 1 Number 2 Winter 2013 1-1-2013 Paid Organ Donations and the Constitutionality of the National Organ Transplant Act John A. Robertson Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.uchastings.edu/ hastings_constitutional_law_quaterly Part of the Constitutional Law Commons Recommended Citation John A. Robertson, Paid Organ Donations and the Constitutionality of the National Organ Transplant Act, 40 Hastings Const. L.Q. 221 (2013). Available at: https://repository.uchastings.edu/hastings_constitutional_law_quaterly/vol40/iss2/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Journals at UC Hastings Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly by an authorized editor of UC Hastings Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Paid Organ Donations and the Constitutionality of the National Organ Transplant Act by JOHN A. ROBERTSON* I. Introduction Organ transplant is a well-established medical therapy that saves thousands of lives. Yet many people who could survive with transplants die on waiting lists. With ever expanding indications for transplant, the supply of organs will never meet demand.' But many more organ transplants could occur than do. Efforts to increase organ supply have been constant since the advent of allografting organs in the 1960s. Most of these efforts focused on cadaveric sources and led to enactment of brain death statutes, organ donor cards on driver's licenses, required request laws, and the like. Still yielding only about 10,000 transplants a year, the latest move to increase supply has been to retrieve donated organs immediately after cardiac death.