A New Approach to Organ Donation

Organ donation depends, in large part, on timing: a person must be dead but the organs must still be alive.  The criteria for declaring a patient “brain dead” is extremely strict and few brain injured people meet it.  

Irreversibly ceasing the heart is a method of preserving organs in patients declared irreversibly vegetative & comatose but not brain dead because of faint brain activity.  The patient is prepped for surgery, their breathing tube is removed, and doctors wait for the heart to stop beating, which must occur with in an hour for organ donation purposes.  But, death could take hours or days, during which time the organs will deterioriate.  

The New York Times published an interesting article on this method of obtaining organs for donation, noting the following: 

[D]octors have created a new class of potential organ donors who are not dead but dying. By arbitrarily drawing a line between death and life — five minutes after the heart stops — they have raised difficult ethical questions. Are they merely acknowledging death or hastening it in their zeal to save others’ lives?

If people with no hope for meaningful recovery can be kept alive artificially, shouldn’t they also be permitted to die artificially?

Darshak Sanghavi, When Does Death Start, NY Times, Dec. 16, 2009.