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Yvettep
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 2806
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, April 02, 2008 - 04:13 pm: | 
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Let’s Harvest the Organs of Death-Row Inmates
Words By Graeme Wood
An unfortunate side effect of hanging or poisoning a man is that his organs go sour before they can be transplanted. Death-row inmates have repeatedly asked to donate their organs, but their requests are always denied. The simple reason is that execution generally ruins organs before they can be harvested. By the time you cut someone down from the gallows or pronounce the injection lethal, the heart and lungs will have thumped and puffed for the last time. Soon after, the kidneys start rotting, and before long nothing is useful but the corneas. Even with beheading— still practiced in Saudi Arabia—the heart and lungs probably wouldn’t make it, says Douglas Hanto, chief transplant surgeon at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
But by using what the bioethicist Arthur Caplan calls “the Mayan Protocol”—a term derived from the ancient Mayan practice of vivisecting their human sacrifices—the removal of organs would itself be the method of execution. If this sounds inhumane, compare it to current practices: botched hangings, painfully long gassings, and messy electrocutions. Removal of the heart, lungs, and kidneys (under anesthesia, of course) would kill every time, without an instant of pain.
So far, the organs of all criminals executed in the United States have stayed with their original owners. Consider the loss. Someone died waiting for that killer’s heart. Two died waiting for his kidneys, and two more suffocated for lack of his lungs. The liver, split two ways, could have saved two babies. Take the hair, bone, skin, ligaments, and fluids for grafts and transfusions, and all that’s left of the donor’s body could be shuffled off into a very petite coffin indeed. The inmate could allow nearly a dozen people to live, in exchange for a body he wouldn’t be around to enjoy anyway. The math says we should encourage death-row organ donation.
But medical ethics, which bars doctors from murdering patients, says we cannot. Physicians have come out strongly against participating in capital punishment, even to administer anesthesia or find a vein for lethal injection. The result: inaccurate injections, and a sometime torturous demise for the condemned. And the fraternity of surgeons is quite attached to its cardinal directive in vital-organ-transplant ethics, the aptly named “dead-donor rule.” They will not take the lungs of someone still using them.
Moreover, Arthur Caplan says, issues of consent should haunt any doctor considering a Mayan-style transplant. We do not take organs from people—even dead people—who have not invited us to do so. Death-row inmates are trapped in cages and desperate to win favor from judges and prison guards. How do we know their invitations are sincere?...
FUll article: http://www.goodmagazine.com/section/Provocations/lets_harvest_the_organs_of_deat h-row_inmates
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Doberman23
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Doberman23
Post Number: 1230
Registered: 01-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, April 09, 2008 - 05:33 am: |
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lol! yeah i think they need to keep things the way they are right now. i could see ethics going really really really bad if they changed the rules. |
Yvettep
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 2813
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, April 09, 2008 - 04:19 pm: |
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Doberman23, I can't find a link, but I recall seeing a headline the other day about a man who received the heart of a suicide victim committing suicide himself. Not saying that there was any organic cause and effect thing going on, but folks' psychology might be enough to give us pause about such donations... |
Arioso_hum
Regular Poster
Username: Arioso_hum
Post Number: 42
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, April 09, 2008 - 05:20 pm: |
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Coincedence...physiologically there is no connection that would cause a person to experience similar psychological issues. Except in the movies...
Most likely the depression came from all of the surgeries and the pain that ensued.
Just a thought. |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 12030
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, April 09, 2008 - 05:23 pm: |
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Yes, YVette, this story was recently in the news, and the kicker was that after meeting the wife of the suicide victim from whom he got his heart, he married her and bought a home for her and her kids before he, too, offed himself. All I gotta say is that this woman must be hard to get along with. |
Yvettep
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 2814
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, April 09, 2008 - 05:35 pm: |
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Arioso_hum, could be. I do not know how prevalent suicide is for organ transplant patients.
Cynique: BWAH!!!! You have a wicked sense of humor, woman! LOL |
Arioso_hum
Regular Poster
Username: Arioso_hum
Post Number: 43
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, April 10, 2008 - 08:32 am: |
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Cynique be's a funny one she is...LOL |
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