Organ donation: The inconvenient truth

Ever since organ donation after a declaration of “cardiac death ” was first practised in the Ottawa Hospital in June 2006, Canadians have been subjected to an incessant drumbeat of rhetorical manipulation in the media in favour of organ donation. The following commentary is offered in order to inform the public about the truth in regard to both the moral principles and scientific facts pertaining to both the donation and harvesting of human organs for transplantation purposes. Many physicians have serious and well-considered concerns about the morality of human organ transplantation and about the fact that the general public has not been properly informed about what really happens when organs are retrieved. Editor: In July 2007, Britain’s Chief Medical Officer repeated an earlier proposal to make a patient’s consent for donating organs a presumed consent, in order to overcome a backlog of requests for organs. All patients, therefore, are counted as organ donors unless they specifically opt out. In Ontario, three legislators recently introduced private member’s bills with similar provisions. Under this regime, organ donations become mandatory-an extremely dangerous development. The following essay explains why. Pope John Paul II, addressing the 18th International Congress of the Transplantation Society on August 29, 2000, stated that, “Vital organs which occur singly in the body can be removed only after death; that is, from the body of someone who is certainly dead... the death of a person is a single event consisting in the tota