My Sister’s Keeper showed the great lengths that a parent will go to save their child’s life. It also showed the gaps in the medical professions standards of ethics when it comes to cases such as this. Each hospital has an ethics commity that convenes to discuss and make decisions about the ethical side of medical procedures and if it is in the patients best interest to undergo such procedures. But they do not look at if it is ethical to force a child to make donations that they do not want to make, because parents have the right to make medical decisions on their children s behalf.
This story brings up so many moral, ethical and legal issues surrounding organ and tissue donation. Such as, is a child capable of making their own medical decisions? Is it really in the child’s best interest to force them to undergo a medical procedure that they do not personally need, or that does not benefit them physically in any way, in order to save another if they do not wish to go through with it? In a situation like this, are the parents actually able to make an informed decision or are they swayed by the sickness of one child over the health of another? In this case, Kate has been so sick for so long, and Anna was conceived purely to make sure that Kate lived, so are her parents really able to make the big decision of kidney donation? Is it ethically and morally okay to have a child just to save another? And if that does happen, is it then okay to submit that child to a lifetime of donations in order to keep her sister alive? Would Anna be more damaged by going through with the transplant and having to live with the affects of that, or would it be worst to lose her sister? This novel raised so many questions that really are unanswerable.
I really thought, as I was reading this novel, that I knew what was going to happen in the end. Boy, was I wrong! Jodi Picoult not only wrote a gripping story but ended it with an event that is shocking and all the more heartbreaking....