Why can't organ donors be considered martyrs of charity?

[jsb4289]

I have been reading everything I can find regarding the Church’s position on organ donation, and it seems that most debates are centered around around whether or not a person can be unmistakably determined to be dead. Forgive me if I sound naive, but why is it necessary that they be dead? Why can’t their premeditated consent to organ donation (via a donor card, living will, etc.) be considered an act of charity, or a sacrifice for the good of someone else? I understand that suicide is never acceptable; however, if one is willingly giving up his life for the sake of someone else’s, can that be considered a sacrifice rather than a suicide?

 

[Michelle_Arnold]

The difference between a martyr and a suicide is that the person who is martyred is willing to die but does not actually participate in his own death (and may even survive if the killers do not follow through), while a person who commits suicide deliberately chooses to kill himself or participate in his own death. So, for example, St. Maximilian Kolbe was a martyr of charity because he offered to take the place in a starvation bunker of another man, allowing the Nazis to starve him but not killing himself or participating in his own death. He could, in theory, have survived had his captors changed their minds about starving the prisoners, or if the camp had been liberated by the Allies before St. Maximilian’s death. On the other hand, someone who willingly consents to allow doctors to pull his heart from his chest while he yet lives (which is what happens in a heart transplant), so that it can be transplanted into someone deemed “more worthy” of living, participates in his own murder. Not only is he culpable for his own death, but he may even share in culpability for the deaths of those whose murders are made possible by the precedent he has set.