Restrictions against organ donations by living donors are to be relaxed to allow people to donate organs to blood relatives within the fifth degree of kinship to themselves -- or to a spouse to whom they have been married for at least two years, or produced offspring with -- legislators announced yesterday. The fifth degree of kinship extends as far as cousins, but the amendment, like the existing regulation, excludes relatives by marriage.
The group of legislators -- consisting of legislators from across party lines -- attended a press conference organized by DPP Legislator Lai Ching-te (
The final version of the draft bill is a combination of proposals submitted by the Cabinet and legislators after numerous cross-party negotiations and public hearings.
Lai also announced that a consensus had been reached among legislators to pass the draft before the end of the current legislative session.
"This is a milestone in the development of Taiwan's organ-donation policy," said Legislator Chang Tsai-mei (張蔡美).
The draft 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.
Under the current regulations, living organ donors must be at least 20 years of age and related to the donee within at least the third degree of kinship (relatives as distant as uncles and aunts). Spouses may not donate organs to each other unless they have been married for more than three years.
An additional draft amendment that was revealed yesterday, however, will enable 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, will have to be approved by the ethics committee within each hospital in order to obtain the Department of Health's permission to donate.
A further amendment stipulates that each hospital must, under the supervision of the DOH, appoint specialists to encourage dying patients who are potential organ donors to agree to donating organs after their deaths. In exchange, the DOH will then pay a subsidy toward the funeral costs of the deceased donor.
The legislators said that, by passing the amendments, they hope to raise public awareness of Taiwan's substantial shortage of organ donors and to promote post-death organ donation.
Some legislators also urged the DOH to create a special commission to screen exceptional organ-transplant applications from patients who are in genuine need of organs and are in situations in which the available donors do not meet the criteria stipulated by the regulations.
Huang Fu-yuan (黃富源), vice minister of health, responded that the legislature should give the department one or two years to try out the new regulations before pushing for more liberalization or the establishment of the proposed special evaluation commission.
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