Would you give your kidney to a stranger FOR £35K?

Aresearcher has suggested that a financial incentive could be the answer to the UK’s live organ donor shortage. We ask...

- ALICE MCINTYRE

For most of us, there isn’t much we wouldn’t do for our family – from smaller, simple things, such as offering to babysit or loaning money, to the bigger and far more serious, like donating an organ. Because if a loved one was faced with life or death, most of us would put ourselves forward to save them if we could, wouldn’t we? That’s especially true when you realise that six people die every week waiting for a kidney transplant.

Would you donate a kidney to a stranger? A person can live a perfectly healthy, normal life with one kidney, and about a third of all kidney transplants carried out in the UK are from living donors. However, most live donors are related to the recipient. Being a donor to a stranger is far less common – so what if there was a financial incentive? Just recently, a UK researcher into organ donation suggested that if the NHS was to pay you £35,000 to donate a kidney, it would help combat the donor shortage.

But is being paid to save someone’s life morally right? Is it any different to selling your kidney, which is potentially exploitative? Or is this the answer to the UK’s donor shortage? We investigate, and meet a woman who donated her kidney to someone she’d never met.

‘THE EUPHORIA I FELT WAS INCREDIBLE’

Laura Maisey, 39, lives in Chelmsford, Essex.

It wasn’t something that I spent months or years agonising over. In fact, it probably took longer for me to decide what colour to paint the walls in my bedroom than it did for me to decide to donate a kidney to a complete stranger.