Since most organ donors are not legally dead, there is widespread noncompliance with the dead donor rule. Consequently, we have three choices:
- Decide that the dead donor rule is not that important after all.
- Amend the medical criteria used to determine death to align with the legal standards in the UDDA.
- Amend the UDDA to recognize the legitimacy of prevailing medical criteria.
I recorded this while hiking the Michigan Sleeping Dunes. It summarizes the thesis of a forthcoming article.
I'd go for 3. but fallback to 2. if not possible to abide by 3. In no way would I choose 1. Indeed, even if rules makes patients or doctors suffer (in a physical or ethical sense) they must be abided by.
ReplyDeleteBecause it's only when these rules are violated that you have the objective criteria that you should start thinking about condemning violations or amending the rules. If rules keep being violated, without condemnation for violating them and without incentive to amend them, then there's no point having rules in the first place.
And it's simply not acceptable not to have a dead donor rule of some sort because you indeed have to draw a line somewhere, and to all reasonable extent that line must be death in one sense or another. Simply because it's not ethically defensible to claim that you legitimately extract organs from living people.
So the definition of death needs redefinition, or rather added coherency / less cognitive dissonance. And I'd go for option 3. Which will be a hard sell to the lay public...
...and hard to sell to some in the medical community too.
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