Thursday July 13, 2006
Surgical Preparation For Organ Donation For Non-Brain Dead Patients?: Australia
By Hilary White
CANBERRA, July 13, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Australian Health
Ethics Committee is lobbying to have legislation passed that would
allow those patients who are “certain to die” but not classified as
“brain dead” to be surgically prepared for organ donation before death.
Currently, those patients who are declared “brain dead” are prepared by
a procedure that involves inserting tubes into major arteries to
prepare for cleansing of organs after death, blood tests and drug
administration to better preserve organs.
The Committee’s working party has asked for legislation that would
extend the preparation to those patients who are not “brain dead” but
who are expected to die when the heart stops beating.
"There is only one state of death, but there are two ways in which a
doctor can certify death as having occurred: brain death and cessation
of circulation," said working party chair Peter Joseph. The Committee
argues that the preparation is required because of the speed with which
soft tissue deteriorates when blood is no longer circulating.
The distinction between so-called “brain death” and what is now being
called circulatory death, the cessation of blood circulation and
heartbeat, is coming under increasing criticism from religious
organizations and classical ethicists.
An Australian ethicist, in response to the Committee’s discussions,
expressed concern that patients who agree to organ transplants are not
prepared for such an invasive procedure. The Sunday Age quoted Ray
Campbell, a lecturer in medical ethics at St Paul's Theological
College, saying, “I don't believe anyone who has consented to be an
organ donor at this time would have envisaged this kind of procedure.”
Campbell made a submission to the ethics committee saying he was
concerned that such changes would increase the eagerness of doctors to
cease therapeutic treatment on organ donor patients. “Any attempt to
water down our current definition of death should be resisted,” he said.
Organ donation and transplantation has developed into a multi-billion
dollar industry since the first successful organ transplants and the
development of immunosuppressant drugs in the late 1950’s. The
international demand for organs has helped create the field of modern
bioethics in which ethicists fear seriously ill patients are seen as
living organ farms rather than persons with their own needs.
In 1999, when the Canadian government was looking for ways to increase
organ donations, a Parliamentary committee heard testimony that the
brain death criterion was unreliable at best.
Dr. John Yun, a Richmond, B.C. oncologist told the committee that the
desire to acquire more organs was the motivation behind the invention
of the brain death criterion. "We must not jump to the conclusion that
a dubious definition of death—the medical hypothesis of brain death—is
in fact death," he said.
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