When is it permissible to harvest organs for transplatation? After a patient has died. But how do we define death when the organ that has “failed,“ causing death, then is transplanted into another body where it performs its function perfectly well? This piece in Slate explores the troubling issue.

The US allows open, unlimited killing of unborn babies, including partial birth killings, yet this is a big issue? The law limits the use of fetal tissue to start new strands for research, yet this is an issue? There is a tremendous demand, including people dying everyday, for organs to save lives, yet this is an issue?

Is it straightforward ?

It sounds like in these cases the real cause of death is braindamage, but the patient could be kept “alive” indefinitely on machines. Remember Terri Schiavo ?

They had Congress intervene to keep her “alive” only to find later from an autopsy she was indeed a complete vegetable. The body can function for a long time after the brain has died.

It simply is not practical nor useful to keep someone “alive” on machines forever, particularly when the brain has already died. Not feasible.

So they “kill” the heart in order to unplug the patient from the machine.

If you really want these questions never to come up ban the machines that make all this possible.

In the olden days, a priest would come in, make a few prayers, and after a few days of deterioration the person would expire naturally. The organs would wither too.

I am absolutely appalled.  My stomach could literally lose its contents.

I am an organ donor.  I believe it is pretty straightforward to draw the line on death.  If it’s the heart that is the cause of death for one patient, it should be excluded from transplant. 

The so-called “ethicists” who support “taking organs from living people and causing death in the process,“ are obviously not thinking straight.

All life is sacred…not just the one waiting for someone else’s organ.

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