My Sister's Keeper

When Kinneret was pregnant with David I spoke to a doctor friend of mine about whether or not we should bank his cord blood. He didn't think it was worth it and he added that if we were ever to need cord blood it would be cheaper to have another baby. In the end we decided to bank his cord blood after speaking with another doctor acquaintance (Summy's brother-in-law), although we didn't do it again for Ora.
I recently watched "My Sister's Keeper," a movie that revolves around a family that pursued my first friend's strategy. The daughter is diagnosed with leukemia and after no bone marrow donor can be found her parents decide to have another baby engineered to be a genetic match to the leukemic daughter. The second daughter is born and she ends up serving as a donor on multiple occasions, sometimes suffering severe adverse reactions. When the older daughter goes into kidney failure the mother insists that the younger daughter donate one of her kidneys. At this point the younger daughter says that she's had enough and she retains a lawyer to sue her parents for medical emanciption.

If you like depressing dramas, it's a great movie. But it's also a good springboard for some discussion. The subject of organ donation and halakhah recently flooded the Jblogosphere (e.g., Hirhurim), specifically the question of brain stem death. I think "My Sister's Keeper" would have provided an interesting tangential debate, i.e., may one coerce a minor child to serve as a donor. Even if there isn't actual coercion, do parents even have the right to ask a minor child to serve as a donor?