Let’s Use Pigs as Organ Donors – First Things

There are approximately 120,000 Americans on the organ transplant waiting list, about as many people as live in Charleston, South Carolina and Hartford, Connecticut. Many of these peoples lives will ultimately be saved, after long and harrowing waitsas former Vice President Dick Cheneys was. But others on the list will die before their turn comes up and a suitable donor is found.

These tragic deaths are putting increasing pressure on organ transplant ethics. Some jump the queue and travel to China to buy organsmany of which come from executed political prisoners. Others pay destitute people in developing countries for a kidney; this exploitation of the desperate poor became so rampant that Pakistan outlawed live organ donations to non-relatives and the Philippines banned organ transplant surgeries for non-citizens. Here in the U.S., public intellectuals such as Sally Satel of the American Enterprise Institutewho received a kidney from a live donorargue for changing the law to permit organ sales. Of course, people in Satels socioeconomic class would never be the sellers.

Meanwhile, many bioethicists argue that we should eliminate the dead donor rule that requires donors of vital organs to be deceased before procurement. If these advocates get their way, doctors will be allowed to euthanize seriously incapacitated patients by means of organ harvesting.

Fortunately, organ transplant medicine remains a highly ethical enterprise (although some believe that using brain death to determine readiness for organ procurement is highly questionable). But the waiting lists continue to grow, a fact measured in sleepless nights of desperation and the tragedy of avoidable deaths. This is why the news that scientists have made progress in genetically altering pigs to use in human organ transplantation is so exciting.

Specifically, scientists are learning to alter pig organs to avoid tissue rejection when the organs are transplanted and, more recently, have used a gene-editing technique to help prevent interspecies infections. From the New York Times story:

Some might feel squeamish at having an animal organ implanted into their bodies. But if the choice is between death and receiving a pig kidney, most would take the kidney. And why not? Animal body parts are already transplanted into humansfor example, pig heart valves. If it is acceptable to receive part of an animal organ to save human life, why not the entire thing?

Still, some would certainly object. Utilitarian bioethicists such as Peter Singer might claim that killing pigs for their organswhile sparing cognitively disabled humanswould amount to unethical speciesism, because it would treat humans as having greater value than pigs, based solely on their humanity. Singer rejects human exceptionalism, arguing that an individualwhether animal or humanearns the moral status of person based on the individuals mental capacities. Non-personsagain, whether human or animalhave lesser value and may be used for the benefit of persons. In this view, since pigs have greater mental capacities than people with, say, the capacities of a Terri Schiavo, cognitively disabled humans should be used as organ sources before pigs. (Singer has specifically argued that people in a persistent vegetative state should have been used in creating the hepatitis vaccine instead of chimpanzees.) If we ever accept such a philosophy, it will mark the end of universal human rights, since human non-persons could be exploited and killed for the benefit of persons.

The loudest wailing over pig-organ donation will undoubtedly come from animal rights activists. Animal rights ideology (which must be distinguished from animal welfare) holds that the capacity to suffersometimes called painienceis the proper measure of moral value. Since both animals and humans experience pain, they are morally equal. Hence, raising and killing pigs for their organs would be equivalent to killing racial minorities for the same purpose.

That is nonsense. Racism is an invidious evil because it treats intrinsic equalse.g., human beingsas if they were unequal. But there is a hierarchy of moral worth, with humans at the apex. Not only are pigs not our moral equals, but they cannot possess rights, since they are inherently incapable of assuming duties. It would not be wrong to raise these animals to save human lives. Assuming the safety issue is solved, it would be immoral not to.

This does not mean that the grim good of using pig organs would have to be a permanent policy. We must hope that an even more ethical means of supplying organs will be developed, one that would obviate the need to use sentient animals. Scientists have already learned how to change our skin cells into stem cells, and from there into particular organ tissue. Research is advancing on using these induced pluripotent stem cells to repair damaged hearts and lungs, with hope that some day this technology might even be harnessed to grow new organs from a patients own flesh.

Should that hoped-for day arrive, there will be no further moral justification for using pigs for organsany more than it is currently justifiable to hunt whales for their oil. Then we could stop the pig organ harvest and resume arguing about the ethics of eating bacon.

Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institutes Center on Human Exceptionalism. He is the author of A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy: The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement.

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Let's Use Pigs as Organ Donors - First Things