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I read this novel in about 2020. It seemed to have been written pretty recently.

Any child up to the age of 18 could legally be given up with the permission of their parents and be killed.

I am pretty sure their organs were donated to the sick. I am not completely certain about this detail.

The protagonist is a teenage boy sent to be killed, this is arranged by his mother and stepfather. Naturally he feels horrified and betrayed. He runs away.

He meets other young people who are meant to be killed in this way.

One such boy sticks in my mind. His family are very religious and consider donating his life a tithe. The boy himself is convinced that dying is the right thing for him to do. His family throws him an amazing party before he goes off to die. The Pastor of his church tries to save the boy's life by telling him, in confidence, to run away and hide until he is over eighteen. His large family have adopted and are raising two kids who were left on their doorstep as newborns. One of their own flesh and blood they send to be killed.

There is some reason why leaving newborn babies on doorsteps is very common in this society but I do not recall it.

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    As an aside (it's not what you are looking for but is similarly dystopian and chilling): Philip K. Dick's 1974 story The Pre-Persons (that article has a PDF of the story attached!), in which abortion is legal till the age of 12, so that children under that age live in constant fear of being "aborted" if they anger their parents too much.
    – Peter - Reinstate Monica
    Commented Apr 2 at 10:21

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This is Unwind (2007) by Neal Shusterman.

The Second Civil War was fought over reproductive rights. The chilling resolution: Life is inviolable from the moment of conception until age thirteen. Between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, however, parents can have their child "unwound," whereby all of the child's organs are transplanted into different donors, so life doesn't technically end. Connor is too difficult for his parents to control. Risa, a ward of the state, is not enough to be kept alive. And Lev is a tithe, a child conceived and raised to be unwound. Together, they may have a chance to escape and to survive.

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    It was an interesting read for me, although not enough to sustain me into the later books, which apparently focus on a constructed human being made from various "unwound" parts. There's also a sort of magical transfer of personality/consciousness in the pasts IIRC. If you get hands from someone who practiced stage magic, you'd unconsciously do it yourself.
    – FuzzyBoots
    Commented Apr 1 at 16:33
  • Thanks everybody.
    – Judith Jones
    Commented Apr 1 at 16:37

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