The culture of organ donation in the italian newspapers

Organ donation is an extremely important issue as patients on the waiting lists for transplantation die every year due to the lack of organs. While in Europe, Spain has the highest transplantation rate, in Italy the number of eligible donors who have expressed their will reaches 3,467,465, compared to 49,501,577 eligible donors, and the law that regulates organ donation (n. 91/1999) providing for silent consent has never been applied. The choice to donate vary according to situations: from the healthy citizens’ individual choice to the difficult choice of the family, while they are losing a beloved one. Among other factors, the system of values connected with organ donation and transplantation is a relevant factor often facilitating or hindering this choice. As shown by the literature, the awareness campaigns are based on the ‘‘gift of life’’ discourse in order to promote the benefits of organ donation among members of the general public and to improve donation rates. In fact, many 40 donors have a supportive social network that motivates them and spreads the idea. In order to understand the system of values connected to organ donation, we performed an analysis of the Italian newspapers’ discourses on this topic in the last five years. A sample of 189 most relevant articles containing the multiword "donazione di organi" was collected from the Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica online archives. The large size corpus underwent a multivariate analysis (cluster analysis with a bisecting k-means algorithm on the context unit per keyword matrix and a correspondence analysis on the cluster per keyword matrix) in order to identify the representations and the categories characterizing the cultural symbolization of donation. The results highlight the ambivalence characterizing the organ donation. The elements organizing the cultural symbolization counterpose the life to the death and the family to the collectivity. In line with the literature, the choice to donate reflects the representation of donation as a “gift of life”, but it also recalls the impossible choice of the family in mourning to “give the life away”, and the complexity of the “living death” characterizing transplantation, in which the death person is reduced to a living organ