Every eleven minutes, a patient is added to the list of people waiting for life-saving organ donations at organdonor.gov. Every day, an average of 18 people die because the number of waiting candidates vastly outnumbers the number of organs donated.
Close to 7,000 people die each day in the United States. In the entire year of 2010, fewer than 8,000 organ donors died and made a donation to a waiting candidate, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network.
Every person who makes the commitment to become an organ donor can make a difference. They can save the life of one or more people hoping for an organ before their time runs out.
Considering one’s death is fundamentally uncomfortable, and deciding to donate one’s organs immediately after death is not an easy choice to make.
In these matters, a little bit of misinformation or distrust can easily discourage would-be donors.
This is why I think Dr. Byrne’s crusade against organ donation (“When the Heart Stops Beating”) is dangerous.
Byrne appeals to a folksy conception of death.
“We all know the difference between a living person and a cadaver,” he says. “After true death, there are no organs that can be transplanted.”
He subscribes to an easy definition of death, one in which only rotting things are truly dead.
In an interview with The Michael Fund Newsletter, Byrne describes death as follows: “The soul has left the body and decomposition has begun. After death what is left on earth is a corpse. The remains are empty, cold, blue, rigid and unresponsive to all stimuli. There is no heartbeat, pulse or blood pressure. The patient has stopped breathing. There is poor color of the skin, nails, and mucous membranes. Ventilation will not restore respiration in a corpse. A pacemaker can send a signal but it cannot initiate the heartbeat in the corpse. Healing never occurs in a patient that is truly dead.”
Byrne objects to the declaration of death after a person is brain dead because, in many cases, a brain-dead person kept alive by machinery continues to show superficial signs of life (color, blood pressure, healed incisions).
Byrne’s rigid conception of death, though convenient, is not the standard of the medical community. Although he was once the President of the Catholic Medical Association (U.S.), it is also not the viewpoint of the Catholic Church.
The Pontifical Academy of Science found that brain death can rightly be equated to the death of a person. Pope John Paul said on the topic: “The criterion adopted in more recent times for ascertaining the fact of death, namely the complete and irreversible cessation of all brain activity, if rigorously applied, does not seem to conflict with the essential elements of a sound anthropology.”
He called organ donation a “genuine act of love” and a “way of nurturing a genuine culture of life.”
Although Byrne may try to justify his position with implied horror stories of innocent vegetative patients killed for their organs, it should be noted that there is a difference between a comatose patient and one that has been declared brain dead. There are strict guidelines used by the medical community to determine the level of brain activity, and brain death is, by definition, complete and irreversible.
Although hope or fear of prematurely removing life support may lead us to treat the body of a brain-dead person as a living person, that person is gone.
It is all well and good to publicly espouse oversimplified medical definitions if no harm may come of them. But in this case, failing to recognize the complexity of the issue can cause much harm. It can discourage otherwise well-meaning people from doing one final act of good after their passing. It can lead to unnecessary deaths.
On my driver’s license, there is a small outline of the state of Ohio within a heart, and the words “Organ Donor.” I highly encourage other students at Sinclair to look into the actual facts of the matter, and to consider becoming donors themselves.