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Two experts wrote about making an ethical case for abortion earlier this year. I disagreed, in a piece published by Townhall.com. Then, they responded. In April, Salon issued a piece with the headline reading, “Why the case against abortion is weak, ethically speaking.” Nathan Nobis, an associate professor of philosophy at Morehouse College, and Jonathan Dudley, a postdoctoral fellow in molecular genetic pathology at Johns Hopkins Hospital, argued that there’s a moral and ethical case to be made for abortion. “So, is abortion murder?” they asked. “Not unless other widely-accepted medical procedures that end human life are also wrong. But...

Exposing Shocking Horrors Inside Sujiatun Concentration Camp By Ji Da Epoch Times Staff Mar 11, 2006 A reporter from China who worked for a Japanese television news agency and specialized in Chinese news recently escaped to the United States after being wanted in China for reporting on controversial issues. (The Epoch Times) High-res image (1200 x 900 px, 72 dpi) [ Warning: graphic photos below ] Falun Gong Practitioners a Cheap Source of Black Market Organs In recent years, international organ buying and selling markets have had extreme shortages. As the world's most populous country with the death penalty, China...

Have you volunteered to be an organ donor? I did. I just clicked the box on the government form that asks if, once I die, I'm willing to donate my organs to someone who needs them. Why not? Lots of people need kidneys, livers, etc. When I'm dead, I sure won't need mine. Still, there are not enough donors. So, more than 100,000 Americans are on a waiting list for kidneys. Taking care of them is so expensive, it consumes almost 3% of the federal budget! So why not allow Americans to sell an organ? People already legally sell blood,...

.... Doctors worried the disease may have mutated, and hoped to study her brain after her passing to find out more. When the time came though, her neurologist couldn’t accept the body. Her son hoped reaching out to other donation facilities could lead to the same result. Days later, he received a wooden box with his mother’s information and an ID number. Inside, he was told, was a majority of her ashes. Years went by before Stauffer learned what he was told, wasn’t the case. “She was then supposedly strapped in a chair on some sort of apparatus, and a...

The California law allowing undocumented immigrants to get driver’s licenses may have an unexpected benefit for thousands of people waiting for organ transplants statewide. The California Transplant Donor Network says undocumented immigrants may have caused a 30% spike in the state’s organ and tissue donor registrations so far this year. The immigrant drivers, many of whom are from Mexico, also could boost numbers of Hispanics on the donor registry who are more likely to match with Hispanics waiting for transplants, the network says.

LifeNews has repeatedly profiled cases where doctors may too quickly began cutting up patients who are not really dead to begin harvesting their organs for donations.These kinds of cases have happened before, as supposedly “brain dead” patients have come back to life just before having their vital organs taken from them after prematurely being declared dead. Although there is nothing morally wrong with organ donations — in fact, it’s arguably a very pro-life action to take — these kinds of stories ought to remind organ donors (and any patient and their family) that doctors are too quickly declaring patients dead...

Video Linky Here We have to thank them...These kind of people donate organs.

It was exactly midnight when Caroline Burns eerily opened her eyes and looked at the operating lights above her, shocking doctors who believed she was dead and were about to remove her organs and donate them to patients on the transplant waiting list. The Syracuse Post-Standard unearthed a report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that chronicled the series of errors that led to the near-organ removal on a living patient at St. Joseph's Hospital Health Center in Syracuse, N.Y., in 2009. "The patient did not suffer a cardiopulmonary arrest (as documented) and did not have irreversible...

Last week, a federal judge ordered Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to allow 10-year-old Sarah Murnaghan, who suffers from cystic fibrosis, to be moved to the adult lung transplant list. That gives her a better chance of receiving a potentially lifesaving transplant. Sarah Murnaghan's fate should force us to examine our organ transplant policy. There are more than 88,000 Americans on the organ transplant waiting list. Roughly 10 percent of them will die before receiving an organ. These lost lives are not so much an act of God as they are an act of Congress because of...

Hospitals could be allowed to keep patients with massive brain injuries alive solely to harvest their organs, under controversial plans being floated by the NHS. The 19 million people on the Organ Donation Register could also be given preference in the event of needing an organ, over those who are not. These are two of the proposals mooted in a consultation being carried out by NHS Blood and Transplant this summer. NHSBT is canvassing views from health professionals and the public on these and other ideas in the online survey, which closes on September 21. If put into practice they...

The last time I renewed my driver's license, the clerk at the DMV asked if she should check me off as an organ donor. I said no. She looked at me and asked again. I said, "No. Just check the box that says, 'I am a heartless, selfish bastard.'" Becoming an organ donor seems like a win-win situation. Some 3.3 people on the transplant waiting list will have their lives extended by your gift (3.3 is the average yield of solid organs per donor). You're a hero, and at no real cost, apparently. But what are you giving up when...

21-Year-Old Man Wakes From Coma Before Doctors Take Organs Tucson, AZ -- A 21-year-old man has awaken from a coma just hours before doctors were ready to shut off life support and take his organs for donation purposes. http://www.lifenews.com/2011/12/22/21-year-old-man-wakes-from-coma-before-doctors-take-organs/

<p>Europe's most poverty stricken residents, from the corners of countries like Belarus and the Ukraine,are being lured by easy money and empty promises to donate vital organs to smugglers.</p> <p>Bloomberg reports the practice is becoming a near epidemic in Israel where religious practices keep the organ donor pool at one of the lowest level in developed countries.</p>

Some 911 calls in Manhattan will now bring out two ambulances, one hurrying to the scene and one lagging slightly behind. The first one will try to save the patient’s life. The second one will try to save the patient’s kidneys, in case the first ambulance fails. After months of grappling with the ethical and legal implications, New York City medical officials are beginning to test a system that they hope will one day greatly increase the number of organs collected for transplant. For five months starting Wednesday, the city will deploy a specially trained team that will monitor 911...

Cass Sunstein, President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), has advocated a policy under which the government would “presume” someone has consented to having his or her organs removed for transplantation into someone else when they die unless that person has explicitly indicated that his or her organs should not be taken. Under such a policy, hospitals would harvest organs from people who never gave permission for this to be done. Outlined in the 2008 book “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness,” Sunstein and co-author Richard H. Thaler argued that the...

Three heart transplants were successfully performed with infant donors whose hearts had stopped beating, according to researchers here, but some ethicists question whether moral boundaries were crossed. The report in the Aug. 14 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine reopened a long-simmering debate that boils down to the question of how to define death of a potential donor before organ harvesting may proceed. The three recipients, mean age 2.2 months, have survived at least 3.5 years with only one having a rejection episode during the first six months after surgery, reported Mark M. Boucek, M.D., and colleagues of...

MELBOURNE, Australia, October 21, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A prominent Melbourne doctor has written that, contrary to popular belief, most organ donations take place before the donor is actually dead.  He argues that the vague criterion of "brain death" has blinded potential donors to the fact that their organs are often harvested while they are still alive.Pediatric intensive care specialist Dr. James Tibballs published his controversial views in the Journal of Law and Medicine earlier this month, calling upon medical institutions to review their organ harvesting guidelines to ensure that donors know that they may be volunteering to surrender their life...

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...

A federally funded research project has described how surgeons were able to snatch the hearts from severely brain-damaged newborns only seconds after they were disconnected from life-support units and transplant the organs into other diseased infants, but the work is raising alarms from those who say the donors weren't dead yet. The work was documented in a report in the New England Journal of Medicine today, which in an unusual move also published a series of commentaries about the study that offered harsh criticism. "It is impossible to transplant a heart successfully after irreversible stoppage: if a heart is restarted,...

House Passes Bill To Allow Helmetless MotorcyclingPOSTED: 8:11 am EDT October 12, 2007 UPDATED: 8:29 am EDT October 12, 2007 The state House again has passed a bill that would allow some motorcycle riders to go without a helmet. Similar legislation passed the Legislature last year but was vetoed by Gov. Jennifer Granholm. The latest version is more restrictive, but likely will be vetoed if it reaches her desk. This year's version passed the House by a 69-39 vote. It now goes to the Senate. The measure would let riders pay a $100 annual fee to allow them to opt...