The National Organ Transplant Act was signed in the United States on 19 October 1984. It created a legal framework for organ procurement and allocation and prohibited the sale of human organs for transplantation. Although American, the law reflected international anxieties about fairness, scarcity, consent, and the moral status of the donated body.

The law helped fix organ donation in the public imagination as an ethical drama rather than a purely surgical one. Poets and writers could draw on the transplant system as a modern parable of gift, sacrifice, inequality, and the uneasy traffic between death and renewed life.