SPH Ethicist: Organ Donor Proposal “Bizarre”: Annas deplores “good as dead” criterion

Boston University | Susan Seligson


A proposal to remove donor kidneys from “as good as dead” patients would be unconscionable, says BU medical ethicist George Annas. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky


With nearly 100,000 Americans needing donor kidneys and a typical wait of three to five years, transplant surgeons and some bioethicists are proposing easing the rules—extending the live donor category to expand to include “emotionally related” donors, from spouses to friends, paying donors, or finding other ways to improve the number and quality of organs taken from trauma victims who are brain dead. The most controversial proposal, by an associate professor of surgery at Brown University’s Alpert Medical School, suggests that doctors not wait until donors are actually brain dead to remove their kidneys. In an article published in the American Journal of Bioethics, Paul Morrissey argues for rule changes that would allow doctors to anesthetize and harvest organs from severely brain-injured patients who are, according to the prevailing definition, still alive.

“Under this protocol, the donor is alive at the time of kidney recovery, but a determination has been made and confirmed by medical experts that death is imminent,” Morrissey writes, noting that kidneys harvested after brain death are often damaged and unusable. Morrissey’s proposal does not sit well with George Annas, a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor and a professor at the Schools of Medicine, Law, and Public Health, where he is chair of health law, bioethics, and human rights. BU Today spoke recently with Annas, who served in the 1980s as chair of the Massachusetts Organ Transplant Task Force. Author or editor of several books, among them American Bioethics: Crossing Human Rights and Health Law Boundaries, Annas explains some of the dire implications of the proposed protocol, which was endorsed by several surgeons and ethicists in comments on Morrissey’s article.

Read more: http://www.bu.edu/today/2012/sph-ethicist-organ-donor-proposal-bizarre/

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