'Ere . . . Can I 'ave your liver?
In Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life", there is a skit where a guy answers the door and a couple of guys in paramedic outfits demand his liver. "But I'm using it!" he says. Ah, but you signed the organ donor card, they tell him. Then they forcibly remove it. "We're saving lives!" they say.
I like Monty Python, but I've always been horrified by that particular skit. It seems that in Britain, they are attempting to do that very thing.
[N]ew recommendations from a government task force would increase pressure on health care workers to identify more "potential organ donor" patients. Pressure will be placed on patients to donate as hospitals will be rated for the number of deceased patients they "convert" into donors.
. . .
More pressure than ever before is being placed on medical systems to procure organs for transplant patients, and the push is increasing to have the organs removed from patients who are dead only in a narrowly defined legal sense. Concerns are growing that patients on life support who have the ability to recover may be killed in order to obtain their organs. The definition of death has been progressively altered under the pressure to increase the number of donors, to include those whose hearts are still beating.
Saving lives, indeed.
I like Monty Python, but I've always been horrified by that particular skit. It seems that in Britain, they are attempting to do that very thing.
[N]ew recommendations from a government task force would increase pressure on health care workers to identify more "potential organ donor" patients. Pressure will be placed on patients to donate as hospitals will be rated for the number of deceased patients they "convert" into donors.
. . .
More pressure than ever before is being placed on medical systems to procure organs for transplant patients, and the push is increasing to have the organs removed from patients who are dead only in a narrowly defined legal sense. Concerns are growing that patients on life support who have the ability to recover may be killed in order to obtain their organs. The definition of death has been progressively altered under the pressure to increase the number of donors, to include those whose hearts are still beating.
Saving lives, indeed.