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Think being the next president would be a brutal job? Imagine being a transplant surgeon. You can't tell the parents of a dying kid when to pull the plug, but you have to be there, ready, the minute he expires. You have to wait until he's dead, but not so long that his organs become useless. You can give him drugs to keep his organs healthy, but you mustn't technically revive him. And you can't remove and restart his heart until it's been declared kaput. Pick up a recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, and you'll see...

Commentary by Dr. Paul A. Byrne, M.D.http://www.thelifeguardian.orgWe are bombarded with propaganda that encourages organ donation. For an organ to be suitable for transplantation it must be taken from a living person. Recent reports in the literature include: Dr. KG Karakatsanis of Greece evaluated current clinical criteria and confirmatory tests for the diagnosis of "brain death" to determine if they satisfied the requirements for the irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain including the brain stem. He reviewed medical, philosophical and legal literature on the subject of "brain death." He presented four arguments:  Many clinically 'brain-dead' patients maintain...

Two former Philadelphia funeral directors on Tuesday admitted to selling cadavers to a ring that cut them up and sold the body parts to hospitals for implants. Gerald Garzone and his brother Louis Garzone pleaded guilty to charges that they conspired with others to take bones, skin and organs from 244 bodies in their funeral homes between February 2004 and September 2005. They were part of a scheme that plundered 1,077 bodies in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania without the permission of relatives in an operation that netted the conspirators $3.8 million. One of the bodies belonged to Alistair...

LONDON, August 28, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - "Very few people," says the head of Britain's leading pro-life organisation, "realise that the pro-abortion and pro-euthanasia lobby believes it can be right intentionally to kill innocent human beings." John Smeaton, Director of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, wrote that a report by a group of scientists, published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), that said doctors should be able to remove organs from patients, even if this would cause the patient's death. "The essential line taken by the paper's authors is that it really doesn't matter whether the...

WEDNESDAY, Aug. 13 (HealthDay News) -- Three new reports challenge current guidelines on how long after cardiac death doctors must wait before taking a heart from an infant organ donor. There's no question that organ donation saves lives, and there's also no question that there aren't enough donor organs to save everyone on the transplant list. However, deciding who is a suitable organ donor, particularly when the potential donor is an infant, is not so clear-cut. Most people are familiar with the concept of organ donation after brain death, but organ donation is also permissible after cardiac death. Cardiac death...

Olympic Inhumanity by: Melinda Zosh, July 30, 2008 There’s only one difference between the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Nazis ripped organs out of live victims after the Olympics. But the Chinese have been harvesting organs from live victims for seven years prior to the Olympics, according to native German Torsten Trey, M.D. “Aribert Heim, also called ‘Dr. Death’ killed [his victims] by injecting gasoline or poison in their hearts; he removed organs from victims without anesthetics; after administering lethal injections, he timed death with a stopwatch,” said Dr. Trey. Trey, spokesperson for Doctors Against Forced Organ...

By the time she was found, her body had become stiff with rigor mortus. (Charleston, West Virginia)—According to the AP report, West Virginia resident, Val Thomas' heart stopped last Saturday morning, and by the time she was found, her body had become stiff with rigor mortus. (Photo: AP)Paramedics were able to revive her, but only after an estimated 15 minutes without oxygen or a pulse—she was rushed to an area hospital. During procedures to lower her body temperature, Val's heart stopped two more times.The Thomas family was told by doctors that Val had only a 10 percent chance of...

CHARLESTON, West Virginia, May 27, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A Virginia family was shocked but relieved when their mother, Val Thomas, woke up after doctors said she was dead. 59 year-old Mrs. Thomas, while being kept breathing artificially, had no detectable brain waves for more than 17 hours. The family were discussing organ donation options for their mother when she suddenly woke up and started speaking to nurses. Ethicists have strongly criticised developments in organ donation criteria that would have made Mrs. Thomas a candidate for having her organs removed before she woke up. At 1:30 am Saturday May 17,...

In early 2006, The Epoch Times first exposed the Chinese Communist Party's crime of harvesting organs from live Falun Gong practitioners. Since then new evidence continues to surface. Recently a witness from Wuxi City, Jiangsu Province has come forward and revealed what he discovered during his detention in Wuxi City No.2 Detention Center. According to the witness, many cases of organ harvesting occurred during 2002. He was detained from 2005 to 2007 because he made opposing comments about China's unlawful control of personal speech and media. During his imprisonment he learned that not only death row prisoners were killed for...

To see photos: please go to Bernard KouchnerInvolved in Albanian Organ Market Milijana Mitrovic was one of Carla del Ponte`s sources for information on death camps in which organs were taken from people, the Kurir daily writes. She claimed Albania is not only a Serbian “blue tomb”, but organs were taken from Romanians, Greeks, Montenegrins, Russians and Arabs as well. The very Albanian political top was in on it, along with KFOR and UNMIK representatives. Among other things, Mitrovic claimed that thanks to the fact she was close to an influential Albanian businessman, she had the opportunity to see the...

BEIJING (AFP) - China bluntly told the world Olympics chief Thursday to keep out of politics, in a tart exchange on human rights following days of protests that have shadowed the Olympic torch around the world. International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge said the Games were in "crisis" following the demonstrations, and urged China to respect its pledge to improve its rights record before the event begins in August. China fired back that Rogge should keep politics out of the Olympics, which Beijing hoped would showcase its much-touted "peaceful rise" to power -- but which have instead become a public...

BELGRADE, Serbia — Serbia's war crimes prosecutor is looking into reports that dozens of Serbs captured by rebels during the war in Kosovo were killed so their organs could be trafficked, the prosecutor's office said Friday. The Serbian prosecutor's office said it received "informal statements" from investigators at the U.N. tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, that dozens of Serbs imprisoned by Kosovo Albanian rebels were taken to neighboring Albania in 1999 and killed so their organs could be harvested and sold to international traffickers. Bruno Vekaric, the Serbian prosecutor's spokesman, said later on B92 radio that Serbian war crimes investigators...

The Hague Prosecution learned while investigating war crimes committed by the Kosovo Liberation Army against Serbs and other ethnic communities that people that disappeared in 1999 in Kosovo were subjected to surgery in which their kidneys and other organs were taken from them and then the smugglers were selling them to foreign clinics, Carla Del Ponte, former chief prosecutor of the Hague Tribunal wrote in her book ‘Hunt’. ‘The victims were most likely abducted after NATO bombing when international peace-keeping forces were already deployed in Kosovo’. Even high KLA members were involved in the operation of smuggling of organs, Del...

One Bulgarian doctor has been arrested for suspected involvement in human organs trafficking, Sofia's Police announced today. According to the same source, the arrested is Stanislav Hristov, the Head of the Pathology Department at the Aleksandrovska Hospital in Sofia. He has been charged with multiple violations of the regulations on human organs handling and transplantation for personal gain. The Public Prosecution Office requested the doctor to be ordered a temporary detention. When asked by Bgnes Agency to comment the case, the Director of the Sofia's Hospital, Assistant Professor Asen Zlatev, said that he would like to see the results of...

The scandal involving kidney transplant kingpin Dr Amit Kumar is just the tip of an iceberg and there are many more bigger racketeers still operating across India, Aruna Th-Hollingshead, a leading agent of medical tourism has revealed. “Having been in the medical field for over 35 years, I can bet my life that Dr Kumar couldn’t hold a surgical knife. There is definitely a team of very experienced and highly skilled nephrologists who have transplanted these kidneys,” Aruna Th-Hollingshead told HT by phone from her Calgary-based office. Aruna, as she likes to be called, is also the North American representative...

LONDON, January 17, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The British government's plans to consider a presumed consent scheme for organ donations was put on the back burner this week as a government appointed taskforce recommended alternative methods to increase organ donations by 50 per cent. But the wording of the recommendations has alarmed pro-life advocates who warn they may increase threats to the lives of vulnerable patients. Elisabeth Buggins, chair of the task force, wrote, "The UK has one of the worst records for organ donation in Western Europe. The Taskforce was, however, greatly encouraged by the evidence it considered from across...

London - Prime Minister Gordon Brown yesterday threw his weight behind a move to allow hospitals to remove organs from dead patients without explicit consent. Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, Mr. Brown said such a move would save thousands of lives and that he hopes such a system can start this year. The proposals would mean consent for organ donation after death would be automatically presumed, unless individuals had opted out of a national register or family members objected.

Gordon Brown has thrown his weight behind a move to allow hospitals to take organs from dead patients without explicit consent.

Organs to be taken without consent By Patrick Hennessy and Laura Donnelly  Last Updated: 9:21pm GMT 12/01/2008     Gordon Brown has thrown his weight behind a move to allow hospitals to take organs from dead patients without explicit consent.   There are more than 8,000 patients waiting for an organ donation   Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, the Prime Minister says that such a facility would save thousands of lives and that he hopes such a system can start this year. The proposals would mean consent for organ donation after death would be automatically presumed, unless individuals had opted...

When Malaka, an Indian tsunami refugee, agreed to sell her kidney, the organ broker told her she would receive $3,500. But after the operation, he gave her only $700 - for an organ that a wealthy foreigner likely paid $40,000. "She got what she deserved," the broker told the National Geographic Channel in an "Explorer" episode, "Inside the Body Trade," that airs tonight. Later, when Malaka's son's kidneys were failing, the doctor told her, "You gave away your kidney. Now your child needs a kidney. Who will give it to him?" While free-market types have talked up Transplant Tourism as...