In 1996, Dr. Jochem Hoyer, a well-known German surgeon and head of a transplantation unit at a university hospital was told by a colleague, “It is easy for you as a transplant surgeon to praise living donors as long as it is NOT you who has to donate, but someone else.”3 Hoyer then voluntarily donated a kidney to an unknown recipient on the Munich waiting list4 with the idea that this would make a “very strong statement.”5
His action led to proposals in Germany for nondirected donation. However, the German Transplantation Act of 1997 prohibited nondirected transplants from living donors.6 Opponents of nondirected transplants feared that this would produce a market in which donors would expect financial compensation. Some surgeons did think that if organs from living donors were to go to someone to whom the donor felt connected, donations might increase.7
One change that might be attributed to Dr. Hoyer’s donation was a substantial increase in the percent of living kidney donations in Germany, jumping from 4% to 20% of all renal transplants.8 The 1997 Transplantation Act was legally challenged, but the German Constitutional Court upheld it.9 In 2012, regulations permitted only first- and second-degree relatives, spouses, and registered life partners to receive a kidney from a living donor. No nondirected donations were allowed.10 This was reaffirmed in 2018: “Altruistic or anonymous [kidney] donation is legally not allowed.”11
Dr. Hoyer stated that it is “…incomprehensible that legislation…disapproves of a consistently lived Christian charity by refusal of an altruistic nondirected donation.”12 Dr. Hoyer was fired from the institution in which he had worked for thirty years.
I just came across an interesting (and not too long) article on this point. Quoting the juicy parts: