Organ opt-out

re: "Stick to humans" (BP, PostBag, March 25, 2022) 

Dear editor,

Having conceded in his first paragraph "that the recipient of a pig heart transplant had died after two months," that, in other words, they did in fact live for two months, in his following paragraph Eric Bahrt then makes the extravagant claim contradicted by this that "animal organ transplants never work." The person who had the two months of life thanks to the transplant of a specially bred pig's heart might beg to differ with the claim that it did not work. 

Mr. Bahrt does, on the other hand, make a good point about the need for more organ transplants from dead or dying human bodies. To achieve this, a better solution than a media campaign urging such donations would be to change from an opt in to an opt out scheme: unless a person has explicitly opted out, their organs should by default be available for transplants after death. As the experience of the Netherlands, England, and an increasing number of countries shows, this greatly increases the number of organs available for transplants. Thailand could immediately implement such a law so that organs that could save a life were extracted before cremation or other funeral services.

However, even with default opt systems increasing the number of available organs, there is a need for more. And there is no good reason why the groundbreadking research into breeding genetically modified pigs to grow organs for harvesting to save human lives should not proceed with due concern to minimize suffering. Pigs lives matter, as do the lives of every sentient being, but the lives of human persons matter more to the extent that the human is a person to a greater extent than the pig or other animal being killed. There are much stronger grounds to ban the brutal factory farming of chickens, pigs and other animals merely to sate piggish human lusts for tasty animal flesh got from deliberately killing, or paying others to kill on command, than there are to ban research into xeno-transplants to save human lives.

 Felix Qui

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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.

The text as edited was published in PostBag on March 29, 2022, under the title "Organ opt-out" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2286734/why-only-now-