Posted on 09/04/2008 4:59:32 PM PDT by wagglebee
LifeNews.com Note: Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, an attorney for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, and a leading monitor of bioethics issues such as assisted suicide, euthanasia and human cloning.
File this in the “As If We Don't Already Have Enough to Worry About” file:
Leading members of the organ transplantation community—backed by some bioethicists—have been waging a quiet campaign for more than ten years to do away with the “dead donor rule,” a crucial ethical protection that requires donors of non paired vital organs to have died before their body parts can be procured.
This isn't a fringe movement.
Indeed, an article urging the extinction of the dead donor rule just appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, probably the most prestigious medical journal in the world. ("The Dead Donor Rule and Organ Transplantation" NEJM (359:7, August 14, 2008).
The authors, Robert D. Troug, MD, a physician at Harvard Medical School, and Franklin D. Miller, a bioethicist at the NIH, claim that patients brain dead may not really be dead, since, as one example, some patients declared dead by neurological criteria secrete certain hormones.
Nor, they argue, should patients whose organs are procured under protocols that permit harvesting two-to- five minutes after full cardiac arrest be considered deceased because some of these patients might be resuscitated with vigorous CPR.
But if they are right—and be clear, I don't accept their premise—then surely the ethical answer isn't to broaden the categories of living patients who are harvested!
Rather it is just the opposite; to tighten the rules to ensure that organs are taken from only truly dead patients. Otherwise, medical ethics will be mutated into mere medical expediency.
Troug and Miller disagree. Rather than death being the primary ethical consideration, they argue, the real issue should be that old catchall that justifies multitudinous wrongs; "choice.” They write:
Whether death occurs as the result of ventilator withdrawal or organ procurement, the ethically relevant precondition is valid consent by the patient or surrogate. With such consent, there is no harm or wrong done in retrieving vital organs before death, provided that anesthesia is administered. With proper safeguards, no patient will die from vital organ donation who would not otherwise die as a result of the withdrawal of life support.
No. No. No.
First, not all patients whose life support is removed necessarily die. More to the point, why should we trust bioethicists and organ transplant professionals to enforce "proper safeguards" when this article claims that the current safeguards aren't adequate despite our having been assured for years that they are?
And if the only thing that matters is consent, why not let any seriously ill patient be killed for their organs? Indeed, why not suicidal people who aren't otherwise sick?
Efforts to undermine the dead donor rule are not only wrong morally, they are profoundly unwise.
If members of the transplant community keep pushing to permit killing for organs, that sound you hear will the mass tearing up of organ donor cards by masses of people who want to be really and truly dead before their livers, hearts, and kidneys are made available for the use of other people.
They are advocating MURDER!
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This is being driven partly by the mistaken notion that a person has a property right vested in himself. Keep it up, and it won't be long until we're seeing live gladiatorial contests, to the death, on TV.
This is a discussion I have with my wife every time we go to get our Driver’s Licences renewed. She always checks off the organ donation box and I have always refused to.
I have maintained that even if the safeguards that are in place today are satisfactory, there is no reason to believe that the safeguards in place five or ten years from now will be satisfactory. As our culture hurtles further down the track toward a utilitarian definition of the value of human life, these safeguards can only be further eroded.
I do not want my check-off today to be construed as consent to whatever the standard practice may be ten years from now, so I point out to her that my wishes and conditions for organ donation, and trust her to respect my wishes out of a sense of love and responsibility, but I have no illusions that the State of New Jersey has either motivation.
When we went to get our licences last Spring, she read the fine print in the pamphlet on organ donation, and was surprised to see that by checking the box, she was permitting her body to be used not only for lifesaving transplants, but also for medical training or experimentation. This is a significant change over the last five years, so now she is no longer a “box checker”, and it is a fight we no longer have to have.
BTW, she still thinks I am reactionary and paranoid, but that even a blind squirrel finds a nut from time to time...
I am an ICU nurse.
Do NOT, NOT, under any circumstances sign an organ donor card!
Tell your loved ones of your wishes and allow THEM to make that decision AFTER you are dead.
I'M TELLING YOU NOW that the temptation is too great for some doctors, many of whom are NOT FROM THIS COUNTRY, to allow you to die with less than every effort being made, if you are a known organ donor. FWIW
As they advance this argument, there will be fewer and fewer people who will give advance consent. People will have a legitimate fear that the transplant surgeon is going to come sniffing around before the treatment physician has finished his work, and that this may effect the quality of care.
Until the minute I am dead, I want the physician to view me as a human being, and not as a collection of valuable spare parts.
I will NEVER sign one, but it’s good to hear the truth for someone one the “front lines.”
I would not want to be in a hospital’s ER if a big-shot needed a transplant and I was a good match
Beginning to rethink the organ donor checkbox on the driver’s license.
Not just murder, but murder with a large profit motive.
Cal, does this link back to the Evergreen Society?
Do I have the right name, you know Hitler and Terri?
and lots of liberals..........
Uncheck the box and tell your doctor you want to live forever.
This is abhorrent, and why I will not sign a living will. Living wills are now misinterpreted to mean “don’t try to help at all.”
This has been going on quietly for some time. Now they are just trying to be more open about it.
Next renewal the box will be unchecked. The repeated irony of leftism - they want *more* but enact policies that produce *less*. The murderously greedy b***ards just can't stop killing the geese who lay golden eggs.
Live forever, though...? That sounds like cruel and unusual punishment, even worse than being forced to watch teeeveee. Instead I'm looking forward to Heaven's eternal glory (which as a sinner I do not deserve, but that's out of scope for this thread).
My husband had a kidney transplant 3 months ago, with a kidney donated by a kind stranger. Whoever you are and whereever you are (I hope you are with the Lord), we thank you. There are not enough kind words to say to you or about you, and we appreciate it more than we can ever express.
With that being said, these last months have been an education, believe me. I won't go into everything we've learned and been exposed to in the transplant experience, but suffice it to say that we are convinced our transplant unit's primary concern is their success numbers, not the health or well-being of transplant recipients.
The idea that these same doctors, whose concern for their own phony-baloney success numbers seems to take precendence over my husband's inability to walk to the bathroom because he's too anemic to put one foot in front of another, will be the ones to decide to terminate someone's life to harvest organs? Frankly, I don't trust their judgment on anything other than the actual mechanics of taking a kidney from one person and putting it in another. Anything having to do with patient care or clinical skills seems to be way beyond these people. I imagine that they have as much knowledge of "bioethics" as they do about particle physics.
Wesley Smith is right about that ripping sound. I reluctantly checked the organ donor's option on my drivers' license application last time, feeling it was my duty to do so since my husband was on the kidney transplant list, but this resurrects all my doubts. I certainly don't want these people in charge of deciding whether I or my husband will live or die.
My gut tells me they will only care about the viability of the organs they can harvest, not the organ donor's life.
The slope is getting slipperier every day.
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