ABSTRACT
A newborn infant with a seriously defective heart lies in the intensive care unit of a California hospital, its life dependent on the slim possibility that a suitable donor heart can be found for transplantation. In another room lies a second infant born with a congenital malformation called anencephaly. The unhappy imbalance between the need for transplantable organs and the supply of such organs is attributable to a number of causes. The crisis in pediatric organ transplantation has given birth to a controversial proposal for the utilization of a source of organs as yet untapped: the two to three thousand anencephalic babies born in the United States each year. The only course of action open to transplant surgeons is to remove the necessary organs from the anencephalic sometime during the infant's brief life span, preferably as close to birth as possible.
