Reincarnation Scaring Off Organ Donors

But some say that if your organs are removed, you may be reincarnated with them missing

There is good evidence for this. So many babies are born without teeth or hair. That has to be because they are reincarnated old men.

Behold the power of superstition that supports selfishness. As eternal as karma.

One of my coworkers once told me “It is alright for you to donate your organs, you’re an atheist, you think you’ll just be dead”

I pointed out that she should believe that she’d still be about to see someone benefit from her donated organs.

It didn’t help…

Luckily, I’ll be dead, and wont need my organs, so they can save someone’s life.

It’d really make more sense if you were assumed to be a donor unless you opted out.

Kudos on the Canadian newspaper link! Not that it matters, but are you Canadian Ron?

Shoot, I’m irrational on this one too. I’m damned if I’ll be recycled. Only if my daughter or grandson need a part. Yep, I admit that’s selfish. Know what? I don’t give a rat’s ass that it is. This body is mine. It is me. And it’s my choice to divy it up and farm it out or not. Anybody wants to that’s their business but I will not be harvested like a damned crop by some Frankensteinish medical refusal to accept death on any level.

You want to know how to up the ante. Let the poor sell what can be when they’re alive. Like your spare kidney or bone marrow. Heck, they don’t even pay for blood anymore. But they sure as heck charge you for it if you get it.

I say if it’s a commodity you have and it’s rare and valuable, allow the poor to sell it. For the highest price they can get.

That’s no sicker than vultures lurking to recycle them after you die. Why shouldn’t the poor be able to do this? God, it’s sickening how they’re always after us for our parts but they don’t want us to get anything back for it. No wonder there’s a thriving black market.

And, seriously, no one should have to agree to it. No matter how stupid their reason not to is. If our own bodies aren’t even our own any more, what the hell is? It doesn’t get any more personal than this. Sorry. No one has the right to someone else’s body against their will.

Before anyone suggests, if it were my daughter or my grandson, I can’t know how I’d feel until faced with it but I’d be being emotional, not logical, and, no, my overwhelming emotions don’t give me the right to take someone else’s body part unless they voluntarily donated it.

muggle,

Anybody wants to that’s their business but I will not be harvested like a damned crop by some Frankensteinish medical refusal to accept death on any level.

You’re right, that is irrational. I hope you don’t get ill but if you do, I hope that you don’t get a transplant over someone who would be willing to donate their organs.

Heck, they don’t even pay for blood anymore. But they sure as heck charge you for it if you get it.

Because paid donors have a higher rate of infectious disease. Paying for blood may turn of people who donate for altruistic reasons. Blood is processed, it isn’t free to deliver from donor to recipient, it has to be tested and stored.

I say if it’s a commodity you have and it’s rare and valuable, allow the poor to sell it. For the highest price they can get.

I don’t think it would be worth much if people were allowed to sell organs freely. There are many more needy donors than there are rich recipients. The reason why the price is so high is that it is a black market.

That’s no sicker than vultures lurking to recycle them after you die.

What’s sick is to describe people who want to save the lives of others as “vultures”.

I’m afraid this article has it all wrong. Belief in reincarnation is indeed the cause of a lot of evils in India but it has little to do with the problem of cadaver donors.

Here’s a little about my background. I am from India and from a Hindu background. In addition, my father is a kidney specialist who has been trying extremely hard (with limited success) to get a cadaver donation program going in India for something like 35 years.

There’s really nothing that I’m aware of in the Hindu doctrine of reincarnation that says that any organs taken from your body will be missing in your next life. Of course people use stuff like this as excuses because they just do not want to donate.

Overall, I’d say there are three reasons why cadaver organ donations don’t happen.

The first reason is that people don’t want to donate and use religion as an excuse. In truth, the actual reason is more cultural than anything else. Indians, in general, are extremely family obsessed and lack, to a certain degree, the kind of community spirit that you see in the west. You are so shocked by the death of your loved ones that you cannot imagine surrendering their body immediately for organs to be harvested. Saving the life of someone you don’t know at all, is not something that enters your head. At that time appeals by doctors at the hospital sound more intrusive than anything else. Of course, you might think about donation after a few days but by that time it is too late – the organs are useless.

The second major problem, is archaic and outdated laws. For the longest time, it was illegal to remove organs from the body until 24 hours after death. Things move ridiculously slowly in India (particularly if there are no votes that will directly result) and it took forever to actually get laws passed that legalized this. Then there was the issue of recognizing brain-death which didn’t happen until the mid-1990s. Even now, some states have restrictions that say that a police officer must be present or you need to get permission from a judge which cannot be easily done when you have maybe an hour (often less) to harvest the organs.

The final issue is the availability of organs, for money, from poor people. India is full of desperately poor people who are quite willing to sell an organ for money and there are enough people rich enough to buy these organs, enough unscrupulous doctors to carry out such transplants and enough corrupt government officials who can be bribed to look away when such an act (which is, technically, illegal) happens. If rich, influential people found that the only way to get organs was through cadaver donors then they would bring their influence to bear on the issue but given the availability of this shortcut, they have no motive to.

Things are changing for the better though. Indians are developing more of a community spirit and are getting better educated about matters. The government has cracked down in a big way on some of the more egregious offenders in the unrelated organ trade and the laws, are, for the most part, finally on the side of cadaver organ donation. So there’s hope for the future.

I’ll leave you with links to a series of articles my dad wrote on the subject for one of Chennai’s major newspapers. The first is on the unrelated organ trade and the other two are on various aspects of cadaver donation. You can see what are the real issues affecting cadaver donation in India.

I know, with this crowd, religion is an easy bogeyman but in this case, it does not bear any significant part of the blame.

Raghu Mani

Muggle, you’re scum. See post by Aj.

Good point about how even a seemingly innocent belief can be dangerous.

To be honest, I was kind of tolerant of reincarnation, it does encourage a bit of a kinship with other living things, as opposed to the monotheistic ‘god gave man the world and everything in it’ stupidity (of course it slightly ruins it by ranking what lives are ‘higher’ than others), and there is a sort of reincarnation, or more accurately recycling, in nature in that what dies is broken down by other life form who are in turn ingested by more.

Still, its a good illustration of why belief is dangerous. Its founding is irrational, and it leads to irrational ideas. I’m reminded of a very old episode of the Simpsons where Bart asks at Sunday school “If your leg is amputated is it waiting for you in heaven?”

Let’s make it a bilateral deal: You die and donate your liver to me, who have split my own liver in a car accident. I donate my wrecked liver to your dead body and you can reincarnate with it. That way, we can both have a new life without being de-livered.

(Hi, I’m here for your pun-ishment. This is a great blog.)

Claudia, thank you for disagreeing respectfully. It’s appreciated.

AJ and ChamelonDave, I don’t think you can point fingers at intolerant Christians any more. You sounded very much like them and did very little to change my mind about my body not being used as a spare parts shop.

And I stick by my term vultures. At least ’til they stop the horrendous practice of pressuring grieving loved ones of the newly deceased not in any shape to make an informed decision to allow harvesting of organs. It’d be much more discreet to put a question on intake forms, just yes or no would you be willing to donate your organs and maybe add an option to talk to a staff members if you have questions.

Just a suggestion. But one hell of a lot less vulture-like. As long as staff member only discussed with those who said yes, I’d like to know more.

I maintain my stance. There’s nothing more personal, more you, than your body and you should maintain control of it. No matter how stupid your reason.

But maybe if the medical profession went after organs in a classier manner rather than in such a barbaric fashion, they’d stop illiciting such viseral emotional shutdowns towards the idea. They come off very sick and twisted with their never-ending give us parts of your body mongering. It’s fucked-up, plain and simple.

There used to be an expression commonly used whenever someone reached the point of using you too much, “What do you want? My blood?” They not only want your blood, they want your parts.

And I’m sorry that face transplant was going too far. That hand transplant was weird but the face was just plain Frankenstein time. We don’t check this bullshit at some point, the whole body will be exchanged parts at some point. Mary Shelly has no idea how accurate her story was.

I suppose I’m being too emotional about that.

Here’s a thought: fight the religionists that are prohibiting stell cell research. It’s a less intrusive way of providing life.

And, you know, at some freaking point, accept death. We all die. And I think we do take it too far sometimes in our fight to prolong it. How the hell bad does overpopulation have to be before we both control births and accept a normal life span instead of thinking we’ve got to keep doing whatever it takes to live longer and longer even though there’s more and more people on the planet?

Shannon, I found this:

What does Judaism have to say about organ donation?
Rabbi Dr. Goldie Milgram, http://www.ReclaimingJudaism.org

Living a mitzvah-centered life is the spiritual essence of being a Jew. Organ transplantation and donation were once strongly limited by Jewish law because they were experimental and endangered life, today these are essential, successful medical life-saving methods. Accordingly, organ donation has become a mitzvah chiyuvit, an obligatory mitzvah, fulfilling Judaism’s great mitzvah of pikuakh nefesh, that of saving a life.

So long as it will not significantly risk your own life, surgical removal and donation of organs such as a lung or a kidney by a living donor is a mitzvah kiyumit, a praise-worthy but not obligatory mitzvah, since with all surgery there is some danger and distress to the donor.

(emphasis mine)

muggle,

1) Not only is pressurizing for organ donation against many code of conducts in many countries, quite a few countries have an opt out organ donation policy. It’s wrong to blame a whole profession for something they have no part in.

2) Many, perhaps most, organ donations come from accidents where patients might not be admitted by their next of kin. People don’t like considering the worst case scenario when they enter hospital with a loved one with a serious injury. And you call people asking for organs after someone has died sick? Asking people to consider their loved ones death when they first come into hosptial after a shocking accident is inhuman.

3) If you think there’s nothing more “you” than your dead body than there’s something seriously wrong. All the atoms in your body can change and you can still be you. You can lay all the ingredients of a human out on a table but it doesn’t mean shit. A living person with a mind is worth a damn. A dead body is worthless in comparison.

4) You’ve persauded me ChameleonDave was right. You are scum. Anyone who can disparage someone who hasn’t got a face or a hand getting one is not right in the head. Anyone who says that a person should just die instead of getting a heart transplant is amoral scum.

muggle,

AJ, that frankly is the pot calling the kettle black. And, again, don’t complain when fundies act the way you do, next time. OK?

I haven’t repeatedly defamed medical professionals, told the sick they should remain so, the dying tough shit. Last time I checked. It’s strange you keep bringing up the fundamentalists, because they also come here and post paranoid rants about their irrational beliefs like you.

For the record, I’m talking about all the constant demands we’re bombarded with. And having read that it’s policy in many hospitals to do just that when a patient dies and, personally, I think that’s pretty cold. So sorry your loved one is dead; may I harvest them for their organs now so someone else’s may live?

Demands? Actual hospital policy? Beginning with “may”? Oh wait, that’s right, you’re lying about the medical profession again. I can assure you, counter to your paranoid delusions, personnel in charge of obtaining transplant consent do not say that as a rule, and they don’t make constant anything, let alone demands. That’s a hateful, foolish, vile lie.

I hope to hell it’s never the opt-out b.s. in this country. Too easy to lose the paperwork and harvest people who don’t want to be. It’s a personal choice. If you want to sign up, that’s your choice. This is mine and I’ve made damned sure my next of kin knows it.

Apparantly too easy to lose paperwork, but too hard to forge paperwork, or disregard it.

Just out of decency and respect to the dead.

The dead aren’t their dead bodies. You can respect the dead, you don’t need to respect the meat bag. Respect the living, treat them with decency.

Well, I say it’s pretty cold not to think how the deceased’s loved ones would feel coming face to face with the donee.

Is ignorance bliss? You think this is like the movie Face/Off? You think that any loved ones would ever come face to face with a recipient and know? More bullshit excuses.

Very well said, Claudia.