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GOV'T MAY PRESSURE CANADIANS TO DONATE THEIR ORGANS

OTTAWA, Apr 23 (LSN) - Yesterday in the House of Commons, the Standing Committee on Health tabled a report entitled Organ and Tissue Donation and Transplantation: A Canadian Approach. The report contained startling recommendations implying that pressure may be exerted on Canadians to donate their organs.

Eric Sorenson reported on CBC's The National yesterday that the "parliamentary committee proposed a three million dollar federal secretariat to work with the provinces." The aims of the proposals are:

i) To better educate the public on the need for donations. ii) To train medical teams to ask families of the dying for organs iii) To require hospitals to register all patients near death as potential donors in a nationwide computer data base.

There has been wider publicity recently of the fact that, for many organs such as the heart, organ donation requires that the donor be "alive" when the extraction occurs. This has caused increasing concern about aggressive organ harvesting policies. Critics of vital-organ donation suggest that declarations of "brain death" do not constitute real death and that the term was manufactured to legitimize the taking of organs from persons who would otherwise have not been declared dead. Using the heartfelt emotional appeals of young children who are in need of vital-organ transplants may cloud the issue and not allow for a clear investigation into the facts.

The parliamentary committee has seemed to dismiss these concerns despite testimony from doctors that brain-dead declared patients have sometimes regained consciousness. Last month, Dr. Ruth Oliver testified before the committee that she is "living testimony that people survive" such declarations. The Vancouver psychiatrist was declared clinically dead in 1977 at the Kingston General Hospital after suffering internal bleeding of the brain.

Health Minister Allan Rock, notorious for his anti-family and anti-life sentiment, urged politicians to support the organ harvesting initiative and promised to respond to the committee's report "in the months ahead."

For the CBC's The National transcript see: (link only valid for today) http://www.tv.cbc.ca/national/trans/current.html

See the LifeSite story HEART TRANSPLANTS: IS BRAIN DEATH REAL DEATH? At:
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/1999/march/99030301.html

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