FAQ

My Sister's Keeper is a 2004 novel by American author Jodi PIcoult. The novel was adapted for the movie by American screenwriter Jeremy Leven. While the novel is fiction, the story is very similar to the real life story of the Ayala sisters. Anissa Ayala was diagnosed at age 16 with leukemia and needed a bone marrow transplant. Since no donor match was available, her parents decided to produce a second child in hopes that s/he would provide a match. At 14 months old, Anissa's sister Marissa-Eve provided her with a life-saving bone marrow donation.

That's an ethical question that cannot be adequately answered on an IMDb FAQ page. In the cases of both the Ayala sisters and the fictional Fitzgerald sisters in this movie, the second child was not conceived "just to use her body parts to save another child." Marissa-Eve Ayala was conceived in love and with the hopes that a one-time bone marrow transplant would cure Anissa's leukemia, which it did. In the case of this fictional movie, Anna (Abigail Breslin) was conceived in love and with the hopes that her placental cord blood would provide the stem cells to cure her sister Kate (Sofia Vassilieva). However, the movie takes the story further in that Kate continues to need parts of Anna's body to survive, and that's where the conflict arises.

Those who have both read the novel and seen the movie say that the general plot is the same, but there have been a few major changes. For one, the character of Julia does not appear in the movie. Jesse (Evan Ellingson) is not portrayed nearly as rebellious as he was in the novel. The biggest difference is that the ending of novel has been changed for the movie.