The draft law on the agenda is a government draft law. MK Arela Golan also submitted a similar draft law.

The Israel Medical Association (IMA) established a committee headed by the chairperson of the Ethics Bureau, Prof. Avinoam Reches, doctors involved in organ transplants, doctors involved in the various aspects of transplants and doctors that are not involved in any way in transplants. Legal counsel from the IMA accompanied the committee’s proceedings.

Financial Consideration in Exchange for Organ Donation from a Live Donor
The IMA categorically opposes granting financial consideration for donations from a live donor. We believe that granting such consideration harbors the potential to create enormous social entanglement and that there is no reason to enable this to happen. Furthermore, we maintain that granting financial consideration in exchange for a live donation paves the way for actual organ trading and it is impossible in practice to prohibit organ trading and brokerage when financial consideration for live organ donation is permitted.

We are shocked to hear of women and minors (as well as men) who sell their body in exchange for money. An enlightened society cannot allow such a phenomenon to expand. We claim that the sale of organs for financial consideration is dangerous and as a society we should not permit it under any circumstances.

Furthermore, we support granting compensation or consideration to the donor’s family, but are opposed to granting consideration in the form of financial payment because this may exert considerable pressure on families whose economic situation is fragile. We believe that the fact that a family earns minimum wages or lower will exert pressure on it to donate the organs of its loved ones for transplant purposes. A Jewish and democratic society cannot ignore the fact that organ donations must be based on an altruistic desire to give, during the greatest of crises, in order to save the lives of others.

Consideration or compensation other than monetary consideration can be granted to a family in other forms and this issue will be addressed below.

The position of the Israel Medical Association with respect to various clauses of the draft law are specified below:

Section 3
We propose removing section C (2) in the government draft law. The IMA, as stated above, opposes granting “payment” to organ donors. We believe that this will exert pressure primarily on low-income families to donate the organs of their loved ones that passed away unexpectedly, even if a priori they would not have done so. 

With respect to the draft law submitted by MK Golan, we maintain that sub-section C (1) should be worded “consideration transferred to the donor’s family according to Section 26”. We claim that the word “payment” should not be used as it trivializes the circumstances and thus the term “considera