Vietnam has scrapped a contentious legislative plan to allow children aged 15 to 17 to donate their organs after death. The decision followed fierce public criticism over the ethics of soliciting consent from minors. Government officials excised the under-18 posthumous donor clause from a revised bill released on Sunday, conceding to parliamentary recommendations that organ donation must remain restricted to legal adults. The retreat marks an unusual bow to civic sentiment in Hanoi.
Vietnam has conducted kidney transplants since 1992 and runs the highest volume of annual organ surgeries in Southeast Asia. Yet a critical bottleneck persists across the country's hospital wards. The vast majority of operations rely entirely on living donors. Unlike Western healthcare systems that draw predominantly from deceased patients to fill donor registries, Vietnam faces a chronic deficit of posthumous contributions. Health authorities had hoped an update to the landmark 2006 Law on Donation, Removal and Transplantation of Tissues and Human Organs would expand that narrow donor pool while protecting patient welfare. Instead, the draft bill submitted to the National Assembly last month ignited immediate friction.
Critics zeroed in on whether parental consent could ever shield adolescents from coercion, guilt, or exploitation within families. Public unease deepened in October after state surveyors questioned primary school pupils as young as seven to gauge attitudes toward the organ bill. The exercise drew sharp rebukes from legal experts, who argued young children could not possibly grasp the medical and ethical gravity of organ harvesting. Lawmakers inside the legislature voiced identical misgivings. "You cannot sacrifice one child to save another," National Assembly deputy Pham Khanh Phong Lan warned colleagues during debate on the measure.
Hearing those objections, the government amended the draft to mandate that only citizens aged 18 or older may register as posthumous donors. But the revised statute does not close the door entirely on teenage contributions. Living minors will still be permitted to donate regenerative tissue—specifically bone marrow and peripheral blood stem cells—exclusively to direct family members when no compatible adult donor can be found. That narrow carve-out will require mandatory physical assessments, independent psychological counselling, and dual consent from both the minor and their legal guardian before any procedure begins.
National Assembly delegates are scheduled to debate and vote on the finalised legislation before the current session closes later this month.