When Organ Donation Kills the Donor

Here's a very clear article on the morality (and immorality) of organ donation, Brain Death and Organ Harvesting. In brief, it's moral when the donated parts of the body come from a true cadaver. The organs can no longer perform their function since the dead body cannot benefit from the good they do.

The problem today, however, is that ESSENTIAL organs are being taken from living, breathing individuals who are labeled "dead" when they are clearly still alive. It happens because a relativistic attitude has crept into medicine that says, "The patient will die anyway." But what actually kills the patient is taking the essential organs. A person who was alive before donating his heart, for example, is surely dead after and the cause was stealing his heart. Here's an excerpt from the article that is clear as a bell. Red highlights are mine:

Before 1968, the determination of the moment of death was done by the cessation of respiratory and cardiac functions, entirely necessary to maintain the unity of a living being. However, it was in 1968 that the Harvard criteria were first proposed and accepted, namely that brain death could be used to determine the fact of death. Professor Seifert, a specialist on the question, had this to say to LifesiteNews of February 24, 2009: "We look in vain for any argument for this unheard of change of determining death ...except for two pragmatic reasons for introducing it, which have nothing to do at all with the question of whether a patient is dead but only deal with why it is practically useful to consider or define him to be dead …the wish to obtain organs for implantation and to have a criterion for switching off ventilators in ICUs."...

A very interesting contribution to the whole consideration of the morality of the removal of organs from persons said to be brain dead has come from an unexpected source. It is the New England Journal of Medicine that published, on August 14, 2008, vol. 359 (7), p. 674-675, an article that demonstrates beyond all serious doubt that the harvesting of organs is done from persons that truly are living, and that in point of fact it is the harvesting of the organs necessary for life, such as lungs, heart, two kidneys, complete liver and pancreas, that is actually the cause of death.

The title of the article is “The Dead Donor Rule and Organ Transplantation” and it was written by Dr. Truong & Professor Miller (see the excerpt below).

The authors do not conclude that organ transplantation ought not therefore to be done, but to the contrary justify it on the purely utilitarian non-principle that the person was going to die in any case. This we cannot accept, as the Church has constantly taught, for the end does not justify the means, and you cannot kill a person on account of the good that can come to another person. Nevertheless, the passage attached as a note below illustrates the principle that the donor of the organs is indeed a living person, and hence that act of taking the organs is the deliberate termination of life, and that transplantation of organs necessary for life can only be justified as the taking of one life to save or prolong another life—that is, by playing God. The authors are entirely in favor of such immorality, but at least they avoid the hypocrisy of attempting to justify it by pretending that the brain dead person is actually a dead non-person, pointing out that he retains many vital functions, and can live for years in such a state.

In their own words: “The uncomfortable conclusion to be drawn from this literature is that although it may be perfectly ethical to remove vital organs for transplantation from patients who satisfy the diagnostic criteria of brain death, the reason it is ethical cannot be that we are convinced they are really dead.” They do not even hesitate to question the motives of the medical profession changing from the definition of death by cessation of cardiac function, to that of brain death, purely and simply to obtain organs for transplantation: “At worst, this ongoing reliance suggests that the medical profession has been gerrymandering the definition of death to carefully conform with conditions that are most favorable for transplantation. At best, the rule has provided misleading ethical cover that cannot withstand careful scrutiny.”

There you have it folks. The definition of death changed to facilitate organ theft. It allows doctors to kill living patients with few prospects and give their organs to those considered more worthy of life. If you're young and have signed an organ donation card you may have signed your own death warrant.