Heart transplant

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I think that if most of my body is still alive even though my brain is declared dead, to be on the safe side, I would prefer to have anesthesia before my heart is cut out of me.
 
Yes, if the ventilator was removed, presumably my breathing would cease and my heart would stop beating—the classic signs of death. At that point there is no question that organs could be donated. But to cut the heart out of a body which at least seems alive obviously requires a different definition of death—which has been provided. And nobody has returned from the grave to tell what that experience was like. Thus my preference for anesthetics.
 
A ventilator alone is not anesthesia. The article linked by Lara shows that there is still debate over the matter.

“Nurses get really, really upset. You stick the knife in and the pulse and blood pressure shoot up. If you do not give anything at all, the patient will start moving and wriggling around and it’s impossible to do the operation. The surgeon has always asked us to paralyze the patient,” Keep said.

The physician criticized a guideline issued last year by Britain’s Intensive Care Society that anesthesia is not necessary to brain-dead organ donors."
 
Your reply is very harsh and out of proportion to the tone of this post. Nobody has made the allegations you are contending. If what you say about being anaesthetized on a ventilator is true, there would not be a discussion about anaesthetizing such as the one in the article I wrote, and others I’ve read online.

The question is not whether medical professionals are incompetent. It is about possible gaps in our knowledge. We don’t know if brain dead people would experience pain when their organs are taken out. They don’t have the pain reflexes that are part of the diagnosis of brain death. It might be a good thing to anaesthetize them anyhow, as it puts the medical staff in the operating theatre more at ease about possible movement, increases in blood pressure and heart rate that occur when the body is opened.

The topic of opt in or opt out could be a new thread.
 
To me, it once again raises the question: Is the patient really dead? Or have we just redefined death in a way that allows us to remove vital organs (without anesthesia)?
 
Lara said:
That’s why some people think the person should be basically thought of as nearly dead, and his organs taken on the basis that self-determination should be considered paramount.

BRAIN DEATH, CARDIAC DEATH, AND THE DEAD DONOR RULE
Click to expand...
An interesting article, which raises a number of distinct issues with regard to organ donation. But this jumped out at me:

“I will make several points in this discussion: When we pronounce individuals dead by neurological criteria, they are not really dead. When we pronounce individuals dead by neurological criteria, they are not really dead.”

This alone puts the brain death organ donation criteria at odds with Catholic morality, unless the standard is changed to say that it’s okay to take organs from “nearly dead” donors, instead of dead donors.
 
I used to have organ donor checked off on my driver’s license but removed that two years ago. Why? Reading about PP selling aborted baby parts did it to me.
 
The problem is that organs can be taken from people who are not dead yet. They may be dying; they may be almost dead, they may be nearly dead, but they are not dead yet. Because once they are dead, nobody wants their organs.

There can never be enough organ donors to satisfy the need for organ donation. That creates a pressure for organ donation and a pressure to presume ‘brain death’ as actual death. But that is not quite accurate.

What is the cause of death of a person who donates his heart? Some underlying disease, or the removal of his beating heart from his body?
 
Dude, if you have zero brain function, there is no one there to consciously feel pain. Even if your body reacts to it (which, I grant, sounds creepy), the “you” of you is way further gone than under any anesthesia.

“Is this person really, truly dead?” is an important moral question about these situations. “Will I feel pain?” is not a sensible worry.
 
Not having personally experienced having my heart being cut from my still living body, I can only take remarks about the patient’s experience as simply speculative. We don’t really know what the patient experiences. The diagnosis of brain death is itself not always accurate; brain death may be declared while some brain function remains. What we do know is that the real cause of death in such a case is the removal of the heart.

The only ethical question here is whether it is morally permissible to remove a vital organ from a patient who is not dead yet.
 
Does it really matter what the organs were used for? I think not. In regard to abortion, the child is living and is killed for whatever reason (inconvience perhaps) and the organs are harvested.

In an adult, how do you know the person is actually dead? If my soul has not left my body, then I believe I am not dead. Why should my organs be harvested if I’m not dead? In the US, if a person has checked off the organ donor on a driver’s license, the family will have hard time stopping organ harvesting. And just using the terms “organ harvesting” makes me just a commodity, less than human.
 
While I certainly don’t want to encourage abortion, and would think it would be even more wrong than it already is to abort a child in order to harvest tissues, I do not see the ethical issue with using the tissues of a child who has been killed and is not coming back to do some good in the world, just as parents sometimes donate organs or tissues of their children killed in accidents. I know many Catholics, for example, reject vaccines cultured in such tissue, even when the child in question has been dead for decades and cannot be further harmed. At least some good is coming out of the evil that was the child’s death.
 
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