Posted on 07/31/2025 6:04:03 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
People die in many ways, but in medicine there are only two reasons a person can be declared dead: Either the heart has stopped or the brain has ceased to function, even if the heart is still beating.
A person may serve as an organ donor only after being declared dead. (Until then, transplant surgeons are not allowed even to interact with a dying patient.) This common-sensical rule underpins organ donation in the United States and many other countries.
Most donor organs today are obtained after brain death, defined by most state laws as a condition of permanent unconsciousness with no spontaneous breathing, no response to pain and no primitive reflexes — in other words, devastation of the whole brain. Organs obtained this way are often relatively healthy, because brain-dead patients can continue to circulate blood and oxygen.
Brain death is rare, though. In New York State, with a population of 20 million, there are on average fewer than 500 cases suitable for organ procurement and transplantation each year.
Far more often, people die because their heart has permanently stopped beating, which is known as circulatory death. However, precisely because the blood has stopped circulating, organs from people who die this way are often damaged and unsuited for transplantation.
The need for donor organs is urgent. An estimated 15 people die in this country every day waiting for a transplant. We need to figure out how to obtain more healthy organs from donors while maintaining strict ethical standards.
New technologies can help. But the best solution, we believe, is legal: We need to broaden the definition of death.
Consider how things currently work. In the procedure known as donation after circulatory death, a typical donor is in an irreversible coma from, say,...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Also the Jigsaw woman.😳
Gen 1:22 Then the Lord God said, “See, the humans have become like one of us, knowing good and evil, and now they might reach out their hands and take also from the tree of life and eat and live forever”— 23 therefore the Lord God sent them forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which they were taken. 24 He drove out the humans, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.
can Karen Ann Quinlan have a say in this ?
Actually, yes.
Everyone gets paid, some hundreds of thousands of $ in a transplant - except the donor. Screw them unless they pay. Same for blood donation.
I suppose the new definition of death is when your social credit score is below some number that the state determines.
NFN, but the author/authors if this NYTimes will likely soon find themselves with daggers drawn against a growing cohort of Catholics who have found the time to examine the issue and are increasingly deciding to withdraw their previous support for “checking the box” (that is, electing to be a potential organ donor), as having been given too hastily, or with too little thought given for the theological implications, or for the spiritually bereft manner in which the organ donation process tends to work itself out in real life.
Repeal motorcycle helmet laws.
Repeal donorcycle helmet laws.
Next move is to remove the need of the donor’s permission.
All your organs are belong to us!
Who is “we?”
And if they get to redefine death, do we get to redefine justifiable homicide?
Thanks for posting. My limited experience made me assume all the things you are saying already, thanks for confirming. I hope I can minimize my dependence on people with callous indifference or even malice.
I am not an organ donor. I will not seek or accept a donated organ.
The entire business is creepy and ghoulish.
.
No
They are already pushing people to declare their family members dead and donate their organs, which they make quite a profit on.
Yup, you explained it pretty well.
Healthcare power of attorney , hcpoa, is usually better than living will. Living willgives more power to doctors and constrains family or hcpoa, docs dont have to listen to them. Hcpoa, docs have to listen to them much more.
Amen! She nailed it!
I received a kidney from my brother, and I disagree with this article (big surprise).
The answer is live donation when possible, considering most are waiting on kidneys and livers. I don’t want to learn that I received an organ from someone who could have lived, just on moral grounds. Anything short of our current definition of death won’t cut it for me - the person organs come from should have literally zero chance of spontaneous circulation and breathing.
Dialysis was awful, and I never want to do it again. I was more easily able to bounce back in my twenties, but I’m almost forty now, and dialysis will only get harder from here. That said, I wouldn’t want an organ from someone capable of a full life.
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