Final Thoughts on Baby Kaylee and DCD
Stephen Drake at Not Dead Yet has an update on Baby Kaylee. She is now considered stable, and is going home. It appears her parents are better educated as to the reality of her condition than they were before the story broke. Would that have happened without the media attention? Or would she have become another Annie Farlow?
Dick Sosbey has a very thoughtful article over at What Sorts of People about the moral and ethical implications of donation after cardiac death, the donation procedure that was going to be used to give Kaylee's heart to another child after the ventilator was turned off; the same procedure that killed Ruben Navarro. Key excerpt here (emphasis mine:)
Is it merely coincidental that the donation-after-cardiac-death donors are almost always, if not always, severely cognitively impaired or labelled as severely cognitively impaired? Has anyone ever transplanted the heart of donation-after-cardiac-death donor who is not severely cognitively impaired into a recipient who is severely cognitively impaired? If so, I would be delighted to hear about it.
Many years ago, in defending the hospitals transplant of a healthy baboon’s heart into a human child, David Larson, co-director of the Center for Christian Ethics at Loma Linda University, has quoted as saying,
If a primate’s capability was higher than a human’s-say a severely mentally handicapped child’s-I think it would be appropriate to support the opposite approach . . . a transplant from a [severely mentally handicapped] child to save the life of a healthy baboon.
So, perhaps the real issue is not whether the donor is already dead or is killed in the process. The real issue is whether anyone cares if he or she is killed, and if the donor has or is thought to have a severe cognitive impairment, no one seems to care very much about the details. In my view, this is the heart of the matter.
Dick Sosbey has a very thoughtful article over at What Sorts of People about the moral and ethical implications of donation after cardiac death, the donation procedure that was going to be used to give Kaylee's heart to another child after the ventilator was turned off; the same procedure that killed Ruben Navarro. Key excerpt here (emphasis mine:)
Is it merely coincidental that the donation-after-cardiac-death donors are almost always, if not always, severely cognitively impaired or labelled as severely cognitively impaired? Has anyone ever transplanted the heart of donation-after-cardiac-death donor who is not severely cognitively impaired into a recipient who is severely cognitively impaired? If so, I would be delighted to hear about it.
Many years ago, in defending the hospitals transplant of a healthy baboon’s heart into a human child, David Larson, co-director of the Center for Christian Ethics at Loma Linda University, has quoted as saying,
If a primate’s capability was higher than a human’s-say a severely mentally handicapped child’s-I think it would be appropriate to support the opposite approach . . . a transplant from a [severely mentally handicapped] child to save the life of a healthy baboon.
So, perhaps the real issue is not whether the donor is already dead or is killed in the process. The real issue is whether anyone cares if he or she is killed, and if the donor has or is thought to have a severe cognitive impairment, no one seems to care very much about the details. In my view, this is the heart of the matter.