When Does Life Stop? A New Way of Harvesting Organs Divides Doctors. | Hacker News Reader

When Does Life Stop? A New Way of Harvesting Organs Divides Doctors.

nytimes.com

20 pointsbookofjoe15 comments

> “You guys can sit in your offices worried about the ethics of something, but you’ve never had to walk into a room where you were facing a patient with a family who’s dying, who’s been waiting for an organ, and who is not going to get an organ, and that patient is going to die,” Dr. Moazami said in an interview. “If you’ve ever experienced that in your life, you will never tell me that what I’m doing is unethical.”

That seems like an appeal to emotion

Yeah, I think the "dead doner" ethics rule is in place for a very good reason. Dr. Moazami and the hospital get paid for every transplant they do, their conflict financial is clear.

Ensuring hospitals are not prematurely ending donors lives is essential to maintaining a large donor pool. If patients have an inclination their life will cut short so they can be harvested they won't sign up.

I’m signed up to be an organ donor on my driver’s license, and I’ll admit this article gave me some uncomfortable feelings over that fact.

If they continue to find “novel” ways of organ donation - they at least need to provide multiple classes of Organ Donor - with one prohibiting this practice.

> I’ll admit this article gave me some uncomfortable feelings over that fact.

Which part made you uncomfortable? Would it improve your comfort level if they started by cutting of your head?

> they at least need to provide multiple classes of Organ Donor

Places do have choices allowing donors to decide which organs, and you could make more specific wishes known in a personal directive. I'm not sure 'classes' makes sense though, as there's a lot of different variables that different people could think should be encoded in an organ donor class.

At that point it's pretty much theater, the only difference between this and clamping the blood vessels in the neck and shooting the coma patent in the head is aesthetic.

Edit: thinking more, by the arguments in the article, it might be a better idea. If someone's willing to get me a NY gun permit and a level A hazmat suit I'd be willing to participate.

Seems like some form of lobotomy or cutting the spinal cord would work too, and be less messy.

https://archive.ph/6i0YQ

Sounds fine to me. It's worth seriously considering the optics of it and how it could influence future potential donors as a practical matter, but one day we'll be able to revive a day old corpse so it's walking around with circulating blood: that's not going to make the corpse not dead and we should not be treating brain dead bodies as living people.

The unpleasant truth is that, other than in cases of complete brain death, there is effectively no way to do a heart transplant without murder. If a heart can be made to beat again, it can be made to beat again. There is not any version of this issue that isn't a particularly morbid form of the trolley problem.

> There is not any version of this issue that isn't a particularly morbid form of the trolley problem.

Do you believe withdrawing life support is murder? What about a doctor following a patients do-not-resuscitate order?

If an accident causes someone to be decapitated, is transplanting the heart from the headless corpse still murder? What if it wasn't an accident but a beheading; who committed the murder, the person that cut off the persons head, or the person that transplanted the heart (or was the victim murdered twice).

How many people, for a long enough period to be meaningful to the question, still have brain activity after being decapitated?

> When Does Life Stop? A New Way of Harvesting Organs Divides Doctors.

"Can we have your liver now ?" Meaning of life by Monty Python

Nice heart you have there. Let's see, no relatives on file. I think you might be entering a coma real soon.

If enough people make citizens' arrests on these doctors for wire fraud or conspiracy to commit murder, they'll get out of town..

https://www.newyorkcriminallawyer.com/is-it-possible-to-make...

No part of mine shall ever be thine! Neither I want some of your's, that's just the course of my thinking, leave me the fuck alone, or get yourself a clone and mutilate that, unblinking!

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