November 3, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Today’s organ donation story is significant vindication of many past LifeSiteNews reports on the issue. Physicians and others have warned that there is far more to the organ donation industry than the public has been told. We have received a lot of flack for those reports from some people in the medical/ethical and even religious community.
Bottom line of today’s report: organ donors (for all major vital organ donations) are in fact always alive when they are killed for their organs. Yes, killed.
That does not mean that they are not gravely ill and very near death, if not imminent death and no longer cognisant. They usually are, but some do survive when they experience dramatic, sudden recovery as they are about to be killed, or when relatives call a halt to the procedure, sensing more time is needed to see if they might recover. We have published many stories of such chilling incidents over the years.
Some organ donations however are still ethical, as explained by Dr. John Shea in a 2006 LifeSiteNews interview’
Shea stated, “non-vital organs may be donated. The most common living organ donation are kidneys. The body has two kidneys and when one is donated the remaining kidney grows in size and capacity to compensate for the missing organ. Furthermore a living donor may donate a part of a liver since the organ re-grows. Also a living donor may donate part of a lung, or part of a pancreas. While these organs do not re-grow, people are able to function with reduced capacity.” He also stated, that after real death “corneas and bone marrow” can still be used and are ethical to be transplanted.
But for everything else, according to Shea and other critics of organ transplants, a patient must be genuinely, verifiably dead for it to be ethical to transplant vital organs from that person to others in need of those organs. The only way this can therefore be permissible is not for the medical profession to keep making up new definitions of death that are not really death, as the doctors in today’s article expose, but to work to find a way to harvest vital organs after a person is really dead.
Better still, would be intensive research to eliminate the entire need to engage in this Frankensteinish, problematic practice of transplanting vital organs from one living human to another. The very existence of today’s flourishing organ transplant industry dulls the motivation to finance research into other solutions to the tragic situations of terminally diseased or damaged organs threatening the lives of otherwise healthy individuals of all ages.
I personally would never consent to donation of my vital organs. Organ industry persuasion specialists have too much self-serving interest (lots of money) in making sure that they get my organs if it can somehow be justified. Doctors and family members are put under subtle but powerful pressure, deliberately when they are most vulnerable, to go along with what is always presented as a noble opportunity.
Today’s published admission by organ donation doctors that donors are alive when their organs are removed also seems related to the fact that most leading abortion advocates now admit every abortion does kill a human being. However, even though the pretense that the unborn is not human or is only a lump of tissue is now dropped, they nevertheless say that it is justified for a woman to have her unborn child killed. A woman’s choice is said to overrule any rights of the unborn child.
All organ removal is still being justified by the doctors in today’s article, even after they acknowledge that donors are alive when the deed is done. Their justification: the end justifies the means.
Where does it stop? That’s the big question.
We have seen that it has been very common for Communist China to kill large numbers of prisoners, to order, in response to requests for specific human organs. There are all kinds of human rights abuses cropping up in other nations as well related to this ghoulish trade in human flesh.
Once serious ethical principles are routinely violated or fudged, eventually anything becomes justified and possible, no matter how bizarre or totally unacceptable it may seem at this time.