I just can't thank you enough for the links. I am so embarassed that I ever even THOUGHT I might have some thoughts about this subject. Little did I know that my idea of no heartbeat as being death was a boon to the organ transplant program. Silly me. Organ transplants need to outright outlawed in light of the potential abuse and complexities. How dare they make the recepient's life more valuable than the doner's life? I have multiple times said it is Frankenstein medicine and of that I am not embarassed.
Babies and Body Parts
Paul C. Fox
Not so many years ago death was a simple enough concept. If a person's heart ceased to beat for any great length of time he was dead, and that was that. Then along came medical technology, and suddenly what had been simple became complicated. Now a person's heart can be stopped completely for hours, and yet, thanks to the heart-lung machine, that person's brain will survive undamaged. The person is dead by the old definition, yet obviously not really dead. On the other hand-again thanks to medical technology-a person's brain can be irreparably destroyed, even though the heart may be kept beating for many hours. The person is still alive by the old definition, yet most of us instinctively feel that he is somehow not really living.
The altered perception of what constitutes life and death underlies the ethical dilemmas surrounding organ transplantation today. Of course, there is no controversy if, for example, a living person voluntarily donates a kidney to a relative who needs one. No one has to die in order for the transplant to be performed. This is not the case, however, with transplantations of such vital organs as the heart, the lungs, and the liver, where the donor must necessarily be dead before the transplantation can take place. Yet since, even with the best available medical technology, the organs deteriorate fairly rapidly, they must be "harvested" (in the macabre terminology of transplantation) when the donor is-you'll pardon the expression-"freshly dead." In other words, there is a considerable urgency about removing the donor's organs as soon as possible after his death. At the same time, there is also an overwhelming need to prevent "premature removal," i.e., removing the vital organs of a person who is not yet dead.
To deal with these problems, the medical community has developed strict criteria for defining what is called "brain death." These criteria are extremely detailed and, until now, very much biased toward presuming that life continues: there is virtually no possibility that a person who is actually still living will be proclaimed dead. For example, someone who has been comatose for years, and whose responsiveness is limited to a few primitive reflexes, will still not qualify as "brain dead" by these criteria. Neither will an anencephalic baby, that is, a baby born with no cerebral cortex but with enough brain matter to permit primitive reflexes. And that brings us to the latest development in the ethics of transplantation.
Consider the following. Of all the children whose lives could be saved by an organ transplant, half die because of a shortage of donated organs. On the other hand, anencephalic babies, who are born with almost no brain but are otherwise physically normal, can only survive a few days after birth. On the surface, it seems like an almost perfect match: the organs of a baby who cannot live can be used to rescue another child who must otherwise die. That, at least, is how it looked to physicians at Loma Linda University in 1987, when they set up a special program designed to salvage the organs of anencephalic babies for transplantation. However, in eight months of operation the program failed to salvage even one viable organ. Why? Simply because these babies were not "brain dead" at birth: impaired as they were, they retained enough brain function to fail the criteria for death. By the time these babies finally did die, their organs had suffered severe damage and were no longer usable.
The physicians and nurses at Loma Linda accepted their defeat, some of them with considerable relief. An anencephalic baby is still a baby after all, and the act of inflicting intensive care on a dying infant simply in order to be able to harvest its organs after death began to take an emotional toll on the staff.
There are some, however, who are not so willing to relinquish this potential source of donor organs. In 1992 the Florida State Supreme Court heard the "Baby Theresa" case. In this case the parents, backed by the ACLU, requested that their anencephalic baby be declared dead at birth, even though she did not meet the accepted criteria for brain death, so that her heart could be transplanted into another child. One can only guess what the parents' motives and feelings were. Perhaps they were trying to assuage guilt feelings or offer themselves comfort by trying to bring some good out of a tragic situation. Perhaps they were able, by some exercise of self-hypnosis, to avoid realizing what would actually be done to their baby: that she would be taken to an operating room, and there-even though she was able to breathe, kick, and cry-her heart would be removed for use as a "donor organ."
The reasoning of the ACLU in this case was chilling. They noted "the inconsistency of permitting the termination of pregnancies up to the moment of birth" while at the same time "prohibiting the donation of organs just after birth." As they put it, "There is absolutely no morally significant change in the fetus between the moments immediately preceding and following birth." Note that exactly the same argument used by the pro-life movement for years in defending the unborn is now being used by the ACLU to justify infanticide.
It is not hard to see where this reasoning leads. Though the ACLU denies that its position "serves as a springboard to institutional murder," it clearly does just that. The reasoning used to justify declaring anencephalic babies "dead" at birth can be applied with equal logic to any other baby whose deformities might have moved its parents to abort it, had they but known of them. In fact, this reasoning really strips all newborns of any protection. If abortion on demand "up to the very moment of birth" is morally acceptable, as the ACLU asserts, why not infanticide on demand? And why stop at infants? There are millions of retarded children and adults whose lives are below the high standards of the social engineers. Why not declare them dead as well? At a stroke, the organ shortage could be solved.
Fortunately, the Florida Supreme Court had the uncommon (these days) good sense to reject the ACLU's arguments. Baby Theresa was allowed to live out her short life without being terminated for some "higher good." But it was too much to hope that the notion of harvesting organs from handicapped infants would die with her.
Last summer, no less an authority than the AMA Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs declared that it is "ethically permissible" for anencephalic infants to be used as donors while still alive. In its opinion, the Council admitted that it is normally preferable for an organ donor to be dead before removing vital organs, but made an exception in the case of anencephalics for two main reasons: first, "because of the great need for children's organs," and second, because anencephalics "have never experienced, and will never experience, consciousness." Or, as one supporter of the decision bluntly put it, "The quality of life for this child is so low it would be ethically justifiable to sacrifice its life by a few days to save the life of another person."
Such reasoning cannot be confined to the narrow case of anencephalics. Due to improvements in prenatal care the incidence of anencephaly has declined steadily, so that fewer than one hundred babies with anencephaly are likely to be born in the United States each year, and many of them are born with such serious organ defects that they would be excluded as organ donors. Clearly, anencephalics alone would not begin to address the "great need for children's organs" that the Council cited in justifying its decision.
The Council's decision must be seen for what it is-the thin edge of the wedge. Using the dual arguments of "no possibility of consciousness" and "poor quality of life," it will not be difficult to extend the Council's reasoning widely. What about children and adults in a "persistent vegetative state"? If in the judgment of the medical experts such people no longer have the possibility of consciousness, what ethical obstacle remains to removing their vital organs? What about the profoundly retarded who, as all compassionate social planners will agree, have a "low quality of life"? What about a child with third-degree burns over 90 percent of his body? He has no chance of survival, and an obviously low quality of life, yet his heart is beating strongly-a heart that another child could use. Why not end the needless suffering of one child, and give the gift of life to another through one painless and humane operation?
Unthinkable? Think again. Think first of everything that was unthinkable thirty years ago and is now commonplace: abortion on demand, the growing acceptance of euthanasia, genetic engineering, cloning, and so on. Think of the unthinkable Holocaust. The ideas behind that horror originated not with the Nazis but with the "humane" social scientists of Germany's finest universities. Then think of the combined resources of the AMA and the ACLU turned against the Baby Theresas of our society. We must anticipate the unthinkable, or the unthinkable will become routine.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul C. Fox, a member of the Hutterian Brethren, is a medical doctor in Farmington, Pennsylvania.
I'm against organ transplants because, when someone is put on a transplant list, that person then is actively hoping that another person, who is now healthy, will die. Even to save my own life, I cannot hope for the untimely death of another. I have written on the back of my driver's license, "not an organ donor." I want no part of that industry.
need to be deeply investigated
How dare they make the recipient's life more valuable than the donor's life?
I have always suspicioned many donor's "die", not for the recipient, but the hospital who makes a whopping amount of money on the procedure
And approaching a family whose loved one has just been injured to coerce them into letting them die ---these people are in no state of mind to make such decisions -