Is Organ Donation Euthanasia becoming our new duty?
I carry a Donor Card and have always encouraged others to carry one. If in death I can give a better quality of life to someone else through my donated organs, what a great blessing that would be. Also, I myself may need a transplant at some point in my life, and if I would not consider donating an organ, how can I expect someone else to do for me what I would never do for others?
The Catholic Church has spoken of its benefits. Pope John Paul II spoke with admiration of acts of organ donation - performed in an ethically acceptable manner - as a ‘sincere gift of self‘, in Evangelium vitae (1995). So, I fully accepted the idea, and indeed had no doubts that it was something I wished to do. However, having read a recent article in on the subject in the prestigious journal Bioethics, I am now seriously reconsidering! Following the matter up, I came across an article on the website of the Culture of Life Foundation, which provides a very reasoned comment on the matter:
“Two medical ethicists from Oxford University, Julian Savulescu and Dominic Wilkinson, argue that euthanasia should be used to maximize the number and quality of organs for transplantation. Patients should be allowed to designate on their end-of-life documents their desire to donate their organs through a process that the authors call Organ Donation Euthanasia or ODE. They carefully qualify the criteria for ODE eligibility: patients must be in intensive care and dependent on life support; they must have planned for the withdrawal of life support if their prognosis is poor; their condition is such that they will die anyway within a short time of the removal of life support; and they must explicitly consent to ODE. If these conditions are met, doctors may put them under general anesthesia and harvest their organs. But intentionally removing vital organs from a living patient, especially the heart, will ordinarily kill the patient. So the procedure is euthanasia.
The authors identify a number of utilitarian benefits to be gained by introducing ODE into transplant medicine, and they say:
“…. However, it is difficult to see why a patient is morally harmed or has their rights violated if they are actively killed, compared with a state of affairs where they die as a result of treatment withdrawal, assuming that they have consented to either.”
For full article see: http://culture-of-life.org//content/view/641/1/
Increasingly Doctors and scientists wish to ignore the whole issue of consent - presumed or otherwise. Most of us live in blissful ignorance of what our medical specialists are really thinking.
If you think I am exaggerating look at this article from SPUC [Society for the Protection of Unborn Children] dated August 2008.
For the full article see: http://www.spuc.org.uk/ddr.PDF
“In a recent paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, heart transplant surgeons described how they modified the definition of death for three brain-damaged infants whose hearts were removed for transplantation into three other infants with severe heart problems. The controversy surrounds the likelihood that the children were not in fact dead.
The journal invited two bioethicists, Robert Truog and Franklin Miller, to write a commentary, which is when the controversy really began to deepen.
The essential line taken by Truog and Miller is that it really doesn’t matter whether the patient is dead or not. Instead what really counts is whether informed consent has been given. In their assertion that it is “perfectly ethical” to remove organs from patients who are not really or convincingly dead, they give voice to the utilitarian ethic, which is that the outcome – organs that save people’s lives - is really so good that traditionally unethical means can be justified.”
Medical personnel are of course, not the only ones to consider that this is the way ahead. See this from the Humanist Life website http://www.humanistlife.org.uk/
“Some hard thinking about organ donation and the way we die, from members of Oxford University research centres. The authors propose that those who want to should be allowed to choose not simply to be allowed to die (in which case organs usually cannot be used), but to actively have their organs removed under general anaesthetic in optimum conditions, to save potentially thousands of lives a year.”
Proposals for presumed consent consider the human body as simply another commodity, with parts can be harvested as we do with plants or animals. The Catholic Church does indeed promote the benefit of organ donation, where “donation” means the freely given decision to transmit the gift of life to another. Presumed consent, where the state or their representatives presume to take authority over our bodies, and decide when and how our organs can be removed is not true consent!
How soon will it be before it becomes a social obligation to have one's organs used to save the lives of others, and how soon after that will the state start to legislate for it, and the medical profession oversee it.
O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!
Shakespeare‘s The Tempest
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