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Brian Lindenberg learned hope can be crushed win DNA matches decline to
donate.
Ya know, now we got two girls at home without a mother, and lots of lives are ruined.
The bone marrow donor program matched
her four possible donors, but all four of Lindenberg's matches said no to
actual donation,
and she died without receiving a bone marrow transplant.
We believe that if
compensation were possibly available,
that would have been enough to persuade at least one of those donors to go
through with it, and would have saved Penny's life, or at least given her a
fighting chance.
This case is about saving lives. The Institute for Justice has teamed up with
cancer patients from across the country and renowned doctor in a major
constitutional challenge to the federal criminal band on compensating bone
marrow donors.
The stakes in this case just couldn't be higher.
One of our clients, Kumud Majumder and his eleven-year-old son Arya, died last
spring.
waiting for bone marrow donor who just never came.
Every day across this country other people like Arya die waiting for bone
marrow donors,
and what we want to do in this case is provide
some modest compensation to
prospective bone marrow donors to help recruit them to be donors and to make
sure they go through with donation when their asked.
Donating bone marrow is simple and safe. Bone marrow is really just a fancy kind of
blood,
and like donating blood, the bone marrow donor doesn't lose anything. Doesn't give
anything up like a kidney donor.
In fact, in this country you can compensate blood donors. You can also
compensate ova donors. But,
surprisingly,
if you compensate a bone marrow donor, the doctor, the patient, the nurses, everyone
goes to prison for five years.
That just doesn't make sense. The equal protection guarantee of the fifth
amendment doesn't allow the government to treat similar things
differently or different things the same.
That's why we have a constitutional violation here, because there is no
difference between donating platelets and donating bone marrow.