The child as organ and tissue donor: discussions in the Danish Council of Ethics.

At the end of 1999 the Danish Council of Ethics published a report on organ and tissue donation from living donors.1 The report focused on kidney and bone marrow transplantations (BMTs), as these are presently the most common transplantations from live donors. During the work on the report, it became clear to the Council that, apart from problems concerning coercion and commercialization that affected both adult and child donors, by far the largest ethical problems occurred in donations from children. In this article I briefly review some of the arguments that were prominent in the Council’s deliberations. It is, however, important from the outset to state that the final recommendations endorsed by the majority of the Council are fairly conventional: