Gift of life or sacrifice?: key discourses to understanding organ donor families' decision-making

Neither property right nor heroic gift, neither sacrifice nor aporia: the benefit of the theoretical lens of sharing in donation ethics

“…However, recent years have also seen a drastic rise particularly in the philosophical and theological interest in the meaning of giving and generosity (see Hénaff, 2010;Wyschogrod, Goux and Boynton, 2002;Milbank, 2001; Schrift, 1997;Derrida, 1997), which has been mirrored in ethical debates on organ donation and in critical sociological, anthropological and ethnological work on the gift metaphor in this context (see Shaw, 2010;Sque et al, 2007;Scheper-Hughes, 2007, Fox andSwazey, 2001). …”

“…The campaign mixed humour with an appeal to take action for the good of others: organ donation can save the lives of fellow beings and it is heroic. Features of the heroic gift-giving framework also recur in empirical studies of donors', recipients' and health care professionals' views on organ donation, as when transplant co-ordinators state that the notion of the gift is the best one available because it highlights the beauty of giving to others without any "strings attached" (Shaw, 2010: 613, see also Sque et al, 2007), or when donors are described, indeed, as heroes (Chen et al, 2006). Some words are needed about the notion of heroism here.…”

Donar, un cambio de vida: comprender la experiencia de familiares que aceptaron la donación de órganos

“…La necesidad de apoyo emocional se solicita durante el proceso 6,22,23 . Se debe estimular la participación en grupos de ayuda, dado los beneficios de participar en estos grupos 24 .…”

A phenomenological approach to the ethics of transplantation medicine: sociality and sharing when living-with and dying-with others

“…2 The point I wish to make, however, is that such intercorporeal exchanges, as they may be called, take place through a dynamic sharing of meaning on bodily levels of existence and co-existence. Consider how Merleau-Ponty uses the notion of being given, when he writes that the central phenomenon, at the root of both my subjectivity and my transcendence towards others, consists in my being given to myself.…”

“…Recent years have also seen a rise in the number of sociological, anthropological, and ethnological works on the gift metaphor in donation contexts [1][2][3][4], as well as in the number of philosophical and theological analyses of giving and generosity [5][6][7][8], which has been mirrored in the ethical debate on organ donation. In order to capture the breadth of this field, four frameworks for thinking about bodily exchanges in medicine can been distinguished:…”