This one's a doozy.
The recent face transplant conducted on a French woman has opened up a huge ethical debate on whether doctors should have removed the face of a brain-dead woman and transplanted it on another person.
The recipient of the face was somehow mauled by a dog and was mutilated quite badly back in May. French doctors had to get permission from the French legal system to do the operation and then waited for a suitable donor. When the brain-dead woman surfaced, they removed half of her face and did the transplant.
It doesn't seem right that someone's body is mutilated to repair the mutilated body of another. Especially when the donor didn't give consent for something like that, and the fact that she lies half alive in a hospital bed with half of her face missing. For something like this, I don't think that the donor's family has the right to allow the medical mutilation of their family member. If it was to donate an internal body part to save a family member, that's one thing, but to make major external changes without consent is just wrong.
This involves not only the French medical and legal communities, but world medical and legal communities as each nation will have to decide if they will allow stuff like this in their territory. What a mess!
Here's another part of the controversy.
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