Down on the Transplantations

A recent medical article had doctors admitting the obvious:  you can't get a live organ from a dead body. Anita Kuhn examines how redefining death makes transplantations a morally complicated procedure. 

One can sympathize with the frustration of a doctor who realizes that a few extra minutes of waiting for one patient to be indisputably dead are all that stand between him and another patient's many years. But those few minutes encompass the momentous difference between waiting on a person's death and killing him.

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Comments

[Harley Wheeler]

What seems to be missing is the principle of patience.
Sometimes we temporarily don't have an ethical means to cure a disease, but that doesn't mean that we never will, nor must a present tradgedy force lasting adjustments to the community's determination to protect life.
The 'lifeboat' concept that these authors present is that either people must be killed or others will die, so why not kill those who are on the way out? The answer to such arguments is that we are rarely without an alternative. Almost certainly we are not forever without treatment alternatives as time passes and medical research continues. We may also pray for miracles in the present, as the seriously ill have always done.
Doctors should work on therapies that preserve the viability of an organ as the body approaches its natural death. There are surely ways to try this, but as long as the envelope can be pushed for faster, pre-death transplants, research efforts will not be spent on this or other solutions.
There is a societal good being preserved, admittedly at the cost of denying an immediate transplant, and it is the standing ethical presumption against utilitarian murder, in any form.

Harley Wheeler

[Clifford Simon]

Therapy to sustain organs in a dying patient would be great. Wouldn't they extend the life of the patient as well? Although, as long as the objective is trying to get the organs before they're wasted, the doctors practicing it may not want to risk extending the patient's life.