… The truth behind organ donation & organ transplants
An extract
by Ellen Bridget Linde, RN, BSN
(As a nurse, Ellen B. Linde is guided by life-respecting values of “doing good” & “doing no harm”. In this article, she reports on her detailed research into organ harvesting practices and protocols, and concludes that harvesting organs from living patients is ethically wrong. Read full article at NursingCenter.com website.)
-------- Some of Linde’s comments: --------
“Some (nurses), believing that removing vital organs is what kills the patient, view organ donation performed under current criteria for pronouncing death as an act of killing. ...not all nurses are comfortable with a value system driven primarily by the needs of transplant recipients rather than by the needs of the potential donor.”
... “The so-called dead donor rule is the legal and ethical standard that requires patients to be declared dead before the removal of life-sustaining organs for transplantation. But what is death and when does it occur? These are complex and controversial questions.”
... “defining death as brain death also presents ethical quandaries. Robert D. Truog, MD, director of clinical ethics at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Mass., writes that using brain death as the standard legitimatizes (sic) organ removal from bodies that continue to have circulation and respiration ..., and this ‘fails to correspond to any coherent biological or philosophical understanding of death.’ ”
... “Where do I stand on organ donation? When I started researching this article, I was an avid, outspoken advocate for organ donation, but I’ve since had a change of heart. Shewmon’s study of 175 patients who met the full criteria for whole-brain death led me to conclude that it’s ethically wrong to recover organs from a person who’s still breathing - regardless of whether or not breathing is achieved through mechanical ventilation.”
( Extract from article in Nursing 2009: Speaking up for organ donors by Ellen Bridget Linde, RN, BSN)
*... Shewmon DA. “Brainstem death,” “brain death” and death: a critical re-evaluation of the purported equivalence. Issues Law Med. 1998;14(2): 125-145.
Linde notes that “Shewmon reported on 175 cases in which the bodies of patients reliably diagnosed as fulfilling the whole-brain death criterion (in general, they didn’t have brain waves) were maintained for varying periods, in some cases years, with little aggressive intensive care besides mechanical ventilation.” She also notes that these patients exhibited various body functions, including: “wound healing, successful gestation of a fetus in 13 women, sexual maturation and growth, and, most disturbing of all, cardiovascular and hormonal stress responses to incision for organ retrieval.”
