Organ Transplantation

[Mrs_V]

My latest issue of From the Housetops arrived yesterday, and on the last page was a letter by Brother Thomas Augustine, M.I.C.M.

The letter doesn’t appear to be available online, and I don’t want to plagerize and type the whole thing up here, but it raised a lot of points about when it is and is not moral to accept an organ transplantation.

Br. writes that the Church is non-negotiable about the fact that all life must come to natural death, and medicine has tried to make organ harvesting as moral as possible by createing the Dead Donor Rule. However, most all organs need to be removed immediately from the body after death in order to be useable for transplantation. He then goes on to write about how the medical community has come up with multiple definitions of death to help with getting around the moral issue. And example being ‘brain death’.

Br. Thomas says that a Catholic can not accept a heart (or what have you) from a brain dead person because their body is still living. The removal of that organ is classified as murder. The doctors decided to end that life when they removed the heart, not God.

I had no idea about this position - and while it makes sense in my head, I can’t help but think about what I would do if one of my family members needed a heart, lung, etc… and a ‘brain dead’ person’s family was willing to donate it for us.

I just read this article yesterday so I am still mulling it over in my head. I may have to talk with my pastor about it to really understand. Have any of you heard about it? What do you think? Do you have any additional information to share?

 

[NPC]

Permit me to quote a reply given in the book “Catholic Replies” by James J. Drummey which addressed this issue:

"Q…Would it be morally valid according to the Church’s teaching to receive a liver from a brain-dead person?

Yes, if by brain dead they mean that the whole brain and the brain stem have stopped functioning. If this situation exists, and there is a possibility of organ donations, mechanical ventilation and circulation may be used to keep the organs fresh until they are ready to be transplanted. The key point to remember, as far as the morality of this procedure is concerned, is that organs can only be harvested from the dead, not from the dying…".

As this reply says - the organ transplant is morally justifiable if taken from the dead. The removal of the heart or other organ does not bring about the death of the person since the organ may be removed and successfully transplanted very soon after the person’s death. Br Thomas, it seems to me, wants to have it both ways - on the one hand he acknowledges that most organs need to be removed immediately after death in order to ensure successful transplantation, yet he seems to be against the very means which make this possible - i.e. ventilation and other life-support machines. If a person’s life is being prolonged artificially when there is absolutely no possibility of recovery, the family must ask themselves for what end are they keeping their loved-one alive - if they are prolonging their loved-one’s life in order that they may give precious life to someone else, surely their actions are highly laudable.

On a final point, I wonder what Br Thomas’ views are on life-support in general - but especially in the case where the person is indeed brain-dead. Indeed there are very difficult moral issues surrounding the question of life-support, but following Br Thomas’ logic (indeed his particular example I probably wouldn’t dispute - that the doctors who would decide to end the life by removing the heart are murderers), does he count those thousands of families every day who have to make that most difficult and traumatic decision to “turn off the machine” as murderers too? I sincerely hope not, and I hope he will never be faced with making this decision for one of his family members.