Physician sounds alarm about unethical or at least highly questionable practices of organ transplant industry
From "The Inconvenient Truth About Organ Donations" by Steve Jalsevac, posted 7/19/07 at Lifesite.org
There has been growing concern over the past several years about increasingly aggressive measures undertaken to harvest human organs from dying patients. Dr. John, Shea, a Toronto physician who has specialized in researching the issue, has just completed a report, Organ donation: The inconvenient truth, that sounds an alarm about the unethical or at least highly questionable practices of the organ transplant industry. The article is published in the September issue of Catholic Insight magazine.
The magazine editor states the article is offered to inform the public about "the moral principles and scientific facts pertaining to both the donation and harvesting of human organs for transplantation purposes. Many physicians have serious and well-considered concerns about the morality of human organ transplantation and about the fact that the general public has not been properly informed about what really happens when organs are retrieved."
Dr. Shea reports on the modern and still very unsettled definition of "brain death" used by many organ transplant physicians to justify declaring organ donors dead and therefore fair game for immediate organ harvesting .
Shea points out, "There is no consensus on diagnostic criteria for brain death. They are the subject of intense international debate. Various sets of neurological criteria for the diagnosis of brain death are used. A person could be diagnosed as brain dead if one set is used and not be diagnosed as brain dead if another is used." It depends on what hospital or which doctor is involved in a particular case.
In fact, says Shea, "A diagnosis of death by neurological criteria is theory, not scientific fact. Also, irreversibility of neurological function is a prognosis, not a medically observable fact."
The coldly utilitarian goal of promoting the acceptance of brain death, says Shea, "is to move to a society where people see organ donation as a social responsibility and where donating organs would be accepted as a normal part of dying." In fact, he says, the specific wishes of a donor opposed to having his organs removed would be bypassed by putting skilled pressure on surviving family members to approve the organ removal.
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