If you're traveling to New York, you
might want to make sure your family knows your organ donation wishes. Some New
York health care workers have filed a lawsuit with the shocking claim that they
were pressured by the state Organ Donor Network to prematurely declare patients brain dead so that their
organs could be harvested. Their lawsuit names four different instances of
unethical organ harvesting at four hospitals. Organ donation has been long
guided by what is known as the "Dead
Donor Rule," which explains that "to hasten the death of a person
whose death... is already inevitable is homicide in law," and that
"anyone removing organs from an apparently inanimate body... must first
ask himself whether he can positively pronounce the body dead."
While that moral barrier
seems like common sense, it's apparently too much for doctors anxious to do
transplants. One of the plaintiffs, Patrick McMahon, a nurse practitioner who
had the role of organ transplant coordinator, may have been fired for resisting
the practice of prematurely calling a patient dead. All four cases included
elements of pressuring next of kin into providing consent before the patients
were dead. The patients included a 19-year-old man who was injured in an
automobile accident, a mother who had recently undergone a kidney transplant, a
woman who was recovering from a drug overdose, and another adult male.
According to McMahon, all patients showed signs of life when they were declared
dead. As with abortion and embryonic stem cells, this is the trend in our
culture: discarding lives of the powerless when they're inconvenient or when
their destruction may benefit the powerful.
Tony Perkins
Family Research Council
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