Huh…interesting. (State of Alabama)

I’m proud to announce that over spring break, I became a licensed driver. Yes, at twenty-one going on twenty-two, I finally tasted the freedom that most of you gained at the tender age of sixteen.

In Pennsylvania, as in many other states, when you get an ID card (including a driver’s license), you’re asked whether you’d like to become an organ donor. (If you were a teenage driver, your parents probably made the decision for you.) To be honest, I had been too preoccupied with my parallel parking to give it much thought. Of course, it’s the Good Samaritan thing to do, but then there are always those who say, “Don’t check the organ donor box, because if you’re in an accident, they won’t try as hard to save you.”

Maybe they’ve heard just one too many horror stories about the trafficking of human organs on the black market. But according to one Washington Post article, these fears aren’t completely unjustified.

When a donor is on his deathbed, organ removal can’t begin until doctors have officially announced his death. Thank you, Captain Obvious, right? Unfortunately, it’s not as straightforward as it sounds. The controversy, of course, revolves around the technical definition of death. Since the 1968 report by the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School, the general consensus has been to define death as “irreversible coma” or “irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain,” as opposed to the traditional definition, which only calls for cessation of heart and lung activity.

In recent years, however, a procedure called “donation after cardiac death” (DCD), in which organs are removed just minutes after a donor’s heart stops beating, has become a growing medical trend. Over the past three years, the number of DCD donors has doubled to 600, and many medical centers are developing policies to allow the procedure.

Surgeons like Francis L. Delmonica of the United Network for Organ Sharing, advocate DCD by citing the over 95,000 people in the U.S. waiting for organs.

But many other experts say that they are hesitant to “blur the definition of death,” adding that DCD has a “ghoulish,” “macabre” feel to it. After all, admits Jerry A. Menikoff, a University of Kansas professor of law, ethics, and medicine, they are “starting to remove the organs a few minutes before [the donors] meet the legal definition of death.” In addition, DCD usually involves patients on life support, which suggests that families of donors, when presented with the option, feel pressured to prematurely terminate treatment.

The thought of DCD is unsettling, to say the least. Organ donation itself is a wonderfully generous and compassionate act, but I simply can’t support a procedure that tweaks the definitions of life and death. As Gail A. Van Norman, a bioethicist at the University of Washington, so aptly puts it, “It’s worrisome when you stop thinking of the person who is dying as a patient but rather as a set of organs, and start thinking more about what’s best for the patient in the next room waiting for the organs.”

So although becoming an organ donor doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ll be a DCD donor, I decided not to check the box just yet–and I can only hope that potential DCD donors out there will stay out of my way on the road.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 at 2:42 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.