| So there's a shortage of human organs in general (especially heart and lungs), which means we need to get them from somewhere. Using complex routes to secure organ donations isn't a great option, because the viability of organs decrease as time goes on, so there is an effective limit on how far they can travel. It also doesn't help people who are currently ineligible for organ transplants, because their current scarcity means that only prime candidates can get them (otherwise it would be wasteful). We could change the organ donation system from opt-in to opt-out, but I get the impression that wouldn't be as ethical from a vegan point of view. That also doesn't help the afformentioned distance problems. Lab grown organs could be a great solution that would actually be better than animal organs, but they're not a viable option yet. Basically, if we had good options other than xenotransplantation, I would probably agree that it's unethical to use their organs. However, we don't have better options right now (especially ones that can scale to treat everyone that needs an organ), so in my opinion, xenotransplants are better than nothing. (Also as a side note, a pig that died from natural causes wouldn't be viable for organ transplantation. The pig needs to be physiologically alive for the organs to be viable, and it needs to be genetically modified to not have animal proteins that the immune system can detect). |