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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

I have never understood the big deal about organ donation. The dead person no longer uses the liver or whatnot and has no opinion. The other 98% of the body will be discarded anyway so why not recycle?

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There was an issue in Israel recently. In Israel usable organs from the dead are given to whoever can use it the most (compatibility + health of recipient). That includes terrorists who are in need of an organ because their organ got damaged while performing a terrorist attack. That caused a lot of Israeli's to no longer opt in.

Now, whether it is better for many innocent people to die so that a terrorist doesn't live is up to you. You asked for a reason, not a good one.

It's part superstition and part weird fear that doctors will let you die in order to harvest your organs.

That's not a weird fear. I've heard of it happening in a specific case.

Do you have any evidence at all? And even if some doctor did that once, to be afraid of some one-in-ten-million evil doctor is still an irrational fear that costs a lot of lives.

I read a specific story where the doctor or doctors wanted to use a body for organs because they thought death was certain, the family resisted, and because the doctor was wrong, maybe had wrong info, the patient lived. I didn't write it down into my book of anecdotes for future message board posting.

It certainly isn't one in ten million "evil" doctors. Consider that you might be underestimating the likelihood because you want people to be organ donors. I'd say the main reason the official respectable stance is that you'll never have your organs harvested when you would live is that people want more organ donors so they fall for whatever belief helps make it happen.

Do you have some specific information about this? Every time it comes up, it's always vague "my cousin's wife's sister's uncle" nonsense. It makes me suspicious.

Nope. And I'm suspicious too. The weird thing is, this was some off-hand anecdote about some other topic, for which organ harvesting wasn't even the subject. Anyway, whenever organs are harvested from a patient who would have lived, it's not like we'd know. Assuming you don't believe the rate this happens is zero, I'm not sure we have substantially different expectations of how often it does.

"would have lived" with continued treatment isn't quite the right metric, because they'd be generally be withdrawing life support with or without taking the organs.

I mean recovered, released from hospital, is-not-a-vegetable.

Depending on how exactly you formalize that argument, it would go through just as well for necrophilia. Yet it's not true that people supporting opt-out organ donation implies they support opt-out necrophilia. So I think most people reject your argument.

This is totally ridiculous. I guess we forgot that society governs itself based on moral norms. Approximately 0% would agree with necrophilia while I am thinking at least >50% would be okay with the idea of donating organs. When you add in the fact that you can opt out... how can anyone object? If you care enough, go ahead and opt out, no one will know or care. You are making a stupid and ridiculous equivalence.

Seems odd to bring up necrophilia, but in general, except for hygenic and crime investigation reasons, "abuse of a corpse" seems like a strange kind of law as well.

I certainly couldn't care less what people might do with my body once I'm dead. Burn it, bury it, ignore it, worship it -- whatever floats their boat.

Or the superstition that the organ will be harvested while you are still alive.

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