Each year, the Department of Motor Vehicles asks college students, faculty and staff, who drive if they want to be an organ donor.
The answer should always be no, according to Bonnie Borel-Donohue, president of the Traditional Values Club at Sinclair Community College.
“Each life has value, dignity and is sacred. It is immoral to use people as though they are objects for organ donation. Somebody is not dead until they are truly dead, until there is no heart beat and no brain waves, until that point, the person is still living,” she said.
On Nov. 10, in the Library loggia, from 12 to 1 p.m. neonatologist Dr. Paul Byrne will give a presentation at Sinclair Community College titled “Organ Donor Transplantation, an Informed Consent: Who decides, you or the government?”The event is open to the public.
“We all know the difference between a living person and a cadaver,” Byrne said in a phone interview. “People who have been labeled brain dead still have vital life because their heart is still pumping. Brain death is not true death.”
In the state of Ohio, the law recognizes brain death as a legal indicator of death.
“The respirator is truly a ventilator; it moves air in only, it doesn’t move the air out. The air out is always done by the body and the moving of the air out occurs only in the living person,” Byrne said. “If someone is a cadaver or a corpse and is hooked to a ventilator, it will push the air in, but the air will never come out. The respirator will only work in the living.”
According to Ohio state law, if you are an organ donor, circulatory and respiratory functions will be kept going by artificial life support, if you are presumed brain dead, to preserve your organs until they can be harvested for transplantation.
“After true death, there are no organs that can be transplanted,” Byrne said. “Every time an organ is transplanted it is a healthy organ, it comes from a living person and after the organ is taken the living person is either dead or weaker.”
“At some level, people have been known to be aware even if they are in a coma. It has been known for some to make a miraculous recovery,” Borel-Donohue said. “It’s unethical to be taking organs out of a living person, to take one person’s life to save another.”
Byrne uses the analogy of slavery to explain how organ donor transplantation actually works. He said that one method of slavery was when the master didn’t allow the subject to know the truth. He said the same goes for being an organ donor because the only information we are provided with is the education of allowing doctors to take our organ, but not knowing that we have to be alive for them to do so.
Both Byrne and Borel-Donohue believe that the law has manipulated and twisted terms to make them sound as if a person is truly dead, words such as ‘brain dead’ or ‘persistent vegetative state.’
“Much of the problem is a manipulation of words,” Byrne said. “You don’t have to be a genius to know the difference between the living and a cadaver. A cadaver doesn’t have a beating heart, and it doesn’t have circulation and respiration and you say, ‘well it is brain- dead,’ then you say ‘brain dead is not a cadaver?’ and obviously it’s not,” Byrne said. “So you see the truth is often very simple. Don’t allow yourself to be twisted and fooled. If the law fools you and twists you then the law is the master and the master is making slaves of you.”