Massachusetts Democrats have a new bold proposal for prisoners to donate their organs or bone marrow. And get as little as a couple of months scrapped off their sentence.
The legislation has raised major bio ethical concerns for the 6,000-plus people currently held in the Bay State’s prisons. In essence, the bill would ask prisoners which is more important to them: their freedom, or their organs and bone marrow.
The bill appears to go significantly beyond other organ-donation policies for prisoners. The Federal Bureau of Prisons says that prisoners may donate their organs while incarcerated. But only to immediate family members.
The new bill, called HD 3822, explains:
“The Bone Marrow and Organ Donation Program shall allow eligible incarcerated individuals to gain not less than 60 and not more than 365 day reduction in the length of their committed sentence in Department of Corrections facilities, or House of Correction facilities if they are serving a Department of Correction sentence in a House of Corrections facility, on the condition that the incarcerated individual has donated bone marrow or organ(s).”
The bill is unlikely to be passed and may even go against federal law, as a similar bill from 2007 was panned due to conflicts with the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984. The act makes it illegal to “knowingly acquire, receive, or otherwise transfer any human organ for valuable consideration for use in human transplantation”,
There is a long history in the medical field of doctors experimenting on and abusing prisoners, including in Massachusetts. While current rules prohibit the state Department of Corrections from “the use of an inmate(s) for medical, pharmaceutical, or cosmetic experiments,” in 1942, a professor at Harvard Medical School injected 64 Massachusetts prisoners with cow’s blood as part of World War II military research, killing one of the subjects.
By Wanjiru Mbaru