New York lawmakers have spent nearly ten years trying to add specific organ-transplant protections for people with disabilities to state law, and the effort is once again stuck in committee as this year's legislative session grinds toward a close. The Organ Donation Fairness Act would prohibit healthcare providers from denying a qualified person placement on a transplant waiting list, a referral, or a transplant itself, solely because of a mental or physical disability. It would still let doctors weigh a disability if an individualized medical evaluation finds it medically significant to the transplant itself.
The bill's history stretches back to the 2017-2018 legislative session, according to Spectrum News, and it has never made it to a floor vote in either chamber. The current Assembly version, A10734, was introduced by Democratic Assemblyman Angelo Santabarbara on March 27, 2026, and remains parked in the Assembly Mental Health Committee. Its Senate companion, S2206, sponsored by Republican Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt, also remains in committee.
Republican Assemblyman Joe Sempolinski, who introduced his own version of the bill in Albany in 2025 before asking Santabarbara to carry the legislation, says he could not identify a single policy disagreement responsible for the bill's failure to advance. Sempolinski has a daughter with Down syndrome and a heart condition, and he says he wants the legislation to pass regardless of whose name is on it.
Advocates Say the Danger Is Real, Not Theoretical
Sean Feeley, chief advocacy and policy officer for the National Down Syndrome Society, says discrimination against disabled transplant candidates can occur through categorical or blanket exclusions of people with Down syndrome and other disabilities. Feeley says discrimination can surface at multiple points in the process, whether during referral, transplant-center evaluation, or waiting-list placement itself. He argues that people with disabilities should receive the same treatment as everyone else when they need care, and that access and the speed of access both matter because transplant decisions can be life or death and often must be made quickly.
Advocates say federal protections, including the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, already prohibit disability discrimination in principle. But they say those protections have not stopped some patients from being denied organ transplants because of a disability, which is why advocates are pushing for transplant-specific laws that make enforcement and application less uncertain. A landmark 2019 report by the federal National Council on Disability found that between 43% and 60% of organ transplant centers considered intellectual disabilities an absolute or relative disqualifier for receiving an organ transplant, and that only 52% of disabled patients who requested a specialist referral for a transplant actually received one.
New York's Waitlist Crisis Raises the Stakes
The stakes in New York are steep. Nearly 10,000 New York residents are currently awaiting organ transplants, according to the New York State Donate Life Registry, accounting for roughly 10% of the entire U.S. organ transplant waitlist. The registry also notes that nearly 500 New Yorkers die each year while waiting for a donor organ, a toll tied to low donor registration rates and limited organ supply. Nationally, organ transplants have hit record volumes, with United Network for Organ Sharing data showing a record 49,000 transplants performed in 2025, the fifth consecutive year of record-high transplant volumes, per Help Hope Live.
New York is now an outlier nationally. The National Down Syndrome Society reports that 40 states have already enacted state-level legislation prohibiting organ transplant discrimination based solely on disability as of 2025. That statutory movement traces back to January 1996, when California advocate Sandra Jensen became the first person with Down syndrome to receive a heart-lung transplant after challenging hospital rejections based on her intellectual disability, according to Disability Rights California. Her case led California to enact the nation's first state anti-discrimination transplant law later that year.
Federal Momentum Complicates Albany's Path Forward
While Albany has stalled, Washington has moved. The U.S. House unanimously passed the bipartisan Charlotte Woodward Organ Transplant Discrimination Prevention Act in September 2024, and in June 2026 the Senate HELP Committee voted unanimously to advance its companion bill, which still awaits action by the full U.S. Senate. The bill is named for Charlotte Woodward, an advocate with Down syndrome who received a lifesaving heart transplant in 2012 and later joined the National Down Syndrome Society staff to champion transplant equity. Separately, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued an updated final rule in May 2024 under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act that explicitly prohibits healthcare providers from denying organ transplants or waitlist placement based on disability or quality-of-life stereotypes.
That federal momentum has left Sempolinski wondering whether state action remains necessary at all. He believes federal protections could make further Albany action unnecessary, though he says he plans to keep pushing for state legislation if Congress does not act and he is reelected, and he says he hopes Congress ultimately passes the federal protections. The National Down Syndrome Society, for its part, considers federal and state protections complementary rather than redundant, arguing both layers work together to strengthen enforcement and recourse for people with disabilities facing discrimination.
Federal civil rights authorities have already had to intervene in individual cases in the absence of explicit statutory guardrails. In 2019, the HHS Office for Civil Rights reached an enforcement agreement with UNC Health Care after a physician allegedly refused to evaluate a patient with an intellectual disability for a heart transplant over concerns about independent living, according to Disability Scoop. UNC Health Care agreed to amend the patient's records to confirm eligibility for waitlist evaluation without admitting liability. For now, with A10734 sitting in the Assembly Mental Health Committee and S2206 still in committee on the Senate side, New York's disabled residents on the transplant waitlist are left relying on federal protections whose enforcement, advocates say, remains uncertain in practice.
