Organ donation IS choosing life over death. It is precisely the point. I work part-time for an organ bank. My job, when called, is to make an evaluation if somebody meets criteria to move forward on donation.
I’ve helped save dozens of lives this way. While I do get paid a small amount, this part-time job represents about 2% of my annual salary. I’m not getting rich this way and it’s not why I do this job. I get called in the middle of the night and called away from meals and movies with my family. I do this job because it is a way for me to give back. Every time I respond to callback, I know that I am 1. possibly saving several people’s lives, and 2. giving some sense to a tragedy (healthy organs normally means a cause of death involving trauma to the brain.) In the months and years that follow a tragic death, donation often does wonders to help mitigate that loss. I personally know people that, months and years after losing their loved ones, discovered that the knowledge that their loved ones saved others lives helped them tremendously through the worst parts.
(One of my partners started working in this job because her son died in a bicycle wreck over a decade ago and had his organs donated. She wanted to see the other side of the decision-making process first hand. She is MORTIFIED now that she “almost” said no. She’s told me several times that she routinely thanks God for giving her the strength walk that valley of her life and make the right decisions.)
Almost every one of these articles posted here on freerepublic use lay terms that, put into context, aren’t compatible with the story being told. What normally happens is somebody has a sensational story to tell based on a narrative they created and, in the retelling, the story reaches media attention.
Let’s take this story. The father was fighting the doctors declaring his son brain dead after they “placed him in a medically induced coma”. After he opposed them, the let him come up out of the coma. These “facts” of this story aren’t compatible with each other.
“Coma” is a lay term; it’s not used professionally. What most people mean by coma is unconsciousness. If the doctors had to ‘induce’ unconsciousness, then somebody cannot be declared ‘brain dead’ at the same time. By definition, somebody brain-dead wouldn’t need to be induced into such a condition and there would be no mechanism to let it wear off, because it wasn’t introduced in the first place.
Now, this article is from Britain, and I cannot tell you the precise rules over there, but, in the United States, an independent third party (me), would never allow such a thing to happen.
IN THE UNITED STATES, organ procurement and organ transplantation has a firewall. The people doing each thing are separated. If I’m a doctor and I want an organ, I can’t find a matching body and declare them brain-dead. It doesn’t work that way.
In fact, on the procurement end, doctors begin to lose - and not make money - from the moment they notify us. A cynical doc wanting to make money would ‘milk’ a critical illness as long as possible.
In the case of donation, once we are officially involved, the account and all services transfer to us. We pay the bills, we receive a federally determined amount of money to stay in operation as a non-profit, and the transplant team ultimately pays us. The doctors on the donation end stop getting paid.
The OPO - organ procurement organization - is the referee. The OPO decides where the organs go and make the calls necessary to make it so. This happens after the doctors on the donation end are off the case and our team of nurses and doctors have taken over. Our team’s job is to get the right organs to the yet third team of docs on the transplant end (who will take over after we are off the case).
Organ donation saves tens of thousands of lives in the United States every year. It is very pro-life. It is endorsed by every major Christian denomination. Why? Most Christians are pro-life - and organ donation is actively consistent with that viewpoint.
Organ donation IS choosing life over death.
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The POINT of the article was not to bash organ donation per se...but rather to highlight the quick assumption of death on the part of some doctors.
The focus is on the culture of death.
Thank you for that post.
We had to make this decision for our daughter, and I’ve often found these types of threads to be very troubling.
Luckily, I have a family member who occasionally participates in these surgeries and he has been able to reassure us.
You do know that the donatee can’t be physically dead to harvest organs, right? That the organs permanently degrade within seconds of the heart stopping. That’s why they take the heart out last. I had all this explained to me by a transplant doctor over dinner at his sister’s house. He was all for organ donation, it kept him in work, but he was brutally honest about how the organs are removed from still breathing people.
This wiki entry on brain death is interesting and discusses the differences between UK and US.
They don’t rely on flat EEG in the UK - which is exactly what the father of this boy requested.
So...according to the US standards, this boy never was “brain dead”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_death
By the way, for everyone who's accepted this article and the "brain death is wrong because it was invented for organ donation"? You may need need to buy into the rest of the short lifesitenews.com blurb on that, the source the journalist relied on, which is also noting that heart transplants are suspect because the first heart harvesting was done in South Africa: "suggested that racism was behind the decision to approve the procedure since the operation took place under the old apartheid system and the donor was a black woman."
Yeah. We have organ transplants because of racism according to the source of this article.