Nineteen-year-old university freshman Chen Hsuan-ting (陳萱庭) will be giving the gift of life to her father in the form of a partial liver transplant this summer, thanks to revisions in organ transplant laws.
The elder Chen is suffering from advanced cirrhosis of the liver and will die soon without the partial transplant.
The 52-year-old law teacher who owns a multi-subject cram school in Taichung, will be the first man to undergo the transplant using his daughter's liver since the legislature passed an amendment Thursday to the law governing human organ transplants.
The amended statute, dubbed a "life-saving bill," states that blood relatives or the spouse of a candidate for organ transplantation can now donate their organs to their family members.
It also stipulates that minors over the age of 18 may donate part of their livers to their blood relatives. The previous law governing human organ transplants requires that organ donors be at least 20 years old.
The daughter is the only person in the family determined by doctors to be medically able to donate part of her liver to her father. Without the transplant, doctors have given the father only six months to a year to live.
She had already agreed to the donation long before the regulations for such operations were changed.
Her father, who has been hospitalized numerous times because of his liver problems, said he has mixed feelings about his daughter's wish to try to save his life.
He said he was glad to get a second chance at life, but was also aware that surgery of this nature did not come without risks and that both he and his daughter might not survive the operations.
While the passage of the amendment will help some, for others the changes are still too restrictive to be of use.
For 28-year-old Lee Hsueh-shien and his wife, being married has not guaranteed them the right to organ transplantation.
Lee, like Chen, needs a partial liver transplant, but his wife will be unable to help him. A loophole in the law states that the spouses must have been married for at least two years and that the wife must have previously given birth. The previous regulations called for couples to have been married for three years before being granted permission for a transplant.
Having given birth, according to the regulations, shows that the woman is healthy enough to offer her organs for transplant.
The Lees have only been wed for three months.
Lee's wife said she knew of her husband's illness before they got married and she decided to marry him because, misunderstanding the law, she thought that she could donate part of her liver as his wife.
The amendments to the Human Organ Transplant Regulation that the Legislative Yuan passed will allow people to donate organs to blood relatives within the fifth degree of kinship -- or to a spouse to whom they have been married for at least two years, or produced offspring with.
The fifth degree of kinship extends as far as cousins, but the amendment, like the former regulation, excludes relatives by marriage.
The amendment also stipulates that hospitals must set up special ethics committees to evaluate the way in which donors consent to have the procedure, the appropriateness of it, and the degree of risk involved in each live-organ transplant operation.
An additional amendment that was passed Thursday enables patients in need of liver transplants to receive liver-tissue donations from relatives within the fifth degree of kinship, including those who are related by marriage, as long as the donors have reached the age of 18.
Donors between the ages of 18 and 20, however, have to be approved by the ethics committee within each hospital in order to obtain the Department of Health's permission to donate, according to the amendment.
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