Paid For Bone Marrow?

Imagine that you have a part of your body that could save another person's life.  Then imagine, you want to be compensated for it.  What if the law against selling body parts jeopardizes your chance for life.

In a ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals the judges decided some bone marrow donors can now be paid and not commit a felony.  The court noted that new technologies for transplanting bone marrow make the tissue more like blood and less like an organ.

The National Organ Transplant Act has banned and made it illegal from anyone to sell human organs.  The ruling in this case came from a a 2009 lawsuit against Attorney General Eric Holder filed by the California nonprofit MoreMarrowDonors.org, parents of sick children and a doctor.  They argued that providing payment is essential due to the great effort of finding a genetic match.  The appellate court determined that new methods of harvesting stem cells from the donor's blood stream rather than the bone did not amount to an organ transfer.