Killing For Organs

November 13, 2011
By Mark P. Moster

Excerpts:
Furthermore, altruism alone is being questioned as the only way to procure organs from living or dead donors. Several alternatives to altruism are currently being discussed and it should surprise nobody that these incentives revolve around money or the demolishing of ethical standards.

In fact, things are taking a decidedly darker turn.

First is the burgeoning illegal trafficking in human organs where people are prepared to pay handsome black market prices for a no-questions-asked kidney, liver, or heart. Unscrupulous middlemen prey not only on the potential recipient, but also on the poor and vulnerable who are often cheated out of organs for a pittance. Nowhere is this practice more odious than in China, where organs are harvested from the corpses of freshly killed prisoners and sold to recipients anxious to survive at any cost...

Second, some countries are looking at the bottom line of cost. Recently, the UK's Nuffield Council on Bioethics floated an idea to monetarily incentivize organ donors by suggesting that the funerals of dead donors be paid for by the state. Financially, everyone wins. It's way cheaper for the government to pay for a funeral than for the extensive medical care for someone who can't get a kidney, for example. However, reducing an altruistic act to a cold-hearted financial contract in and of itself may well change the motivations of both potential donor and recipient...

Another more chilling alternative has been offered recently by several Belgian doctors attempting to increase the number of organs available for transplantation: Harvesting the organs of euthanized patients. Euthanasia is legal in Belgium and most often occurs in the patient's home. However, the Belgian doctors saw an opportunity to determine the exact moment of death, thereby providing optimum conditions for removing the euthanized patient's organs. They describe in detail their procedure from admission of the patient about to be euthanized, how the living patient was medically prepared for organ harvesting after death, how the patient was killed and how the organs were removed by a waiting surgical team in an operating theater adjoining the death room...

The Belgian example also touches on another area: When is a patient really dead? There are two types of recognized definition of death. One is cardiac death, where the heart has stopped beating. The other is brain death, where all brain function is lost. What is problematic, though, is the time between cardiac death and brain death because even if the heart has stopped brain activity occurs at some level. Waiting for brain death takes quite a bit longer than cardiac death. The longer the wait, the more likely it is that the organs for donation will begin to deteriorate. the rest

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