It’s hard to deny that there’s a definite ‘ick’ factor when it comes to the issue of organ donation. Right or wrong. It may be irrational, sure, but the thought of surgeons whipping your goolies out of your still-warm corpse like a Chinese chef serving up a still-gasping carp is hard to get out of your head.
Especially when it may not be so irrational.
Transplant experts are seeing a spike in people revoking organ donor registrations, their confidence shaken by reports that organs were nearly retrieved from a Kentucky man mistakenly declared dead.
It happened in 2021 and while details are murky surgery was avoided and the man is still alive. But donor registries in the US and even across the Atlantic are being impacted after the case was publicized recently. A drop in donations could cost the lives of people awaiting a transplant.
“Organ donation is based on public trust,” said Dorrie Dils, president of the Association of Organ Procurement Organizations, or OPOs. When eroded, “it takes years to regain.”
And, for some unexplained reason, public trust in the medical profession is at a bit of a low ebb in 2025. I can’t imagine why.
Donate Life America found an average of 170 people a day removed themselves from the national donor registry in the week following media coverage of the allegations – 10 times more than the same week in 2023. That doesn’t include emailed removal requests or state registries, another way people can volunteer to become a donor when they eventually die.
Dils’ own organ agency, Gift of Life Michigan, usually gets five to 10 calls a week from people asking how to remove themselves from that state’s list. In the last week, her staff handled 57 such calls, many mentioning the Kentucky case.
It doesn’t do much for public trust either, surely, when the state says, ‘We’re gonna gut you like a pig unless you specifically ask us not to.’
Unlike the voluntary US donation system, French law presumes all citizens and residents will be organ and tissue donors upon death unless they clearly opt out.
After the reports from Kentucky reached France, the number joining that nation’s donation refusal registry jumped from about 100 people a day to 1,000 a day in the past week, according to the French Biomedicine Agency.
At heart (no pun intended) is the fraught issue of just what ‘dead’ really means. I’ve seen people die: sometimes it’s immediately obvious that life has fled the mortal husk; other times, the transition is so subtle that it’s difficult to tell when it actually happened.
Doctors can declare two types of death. What’s called cardiac death occurs when the heart stops beating and breathing stops, and they can’t be restored.
Brain death is declared when the entire brain permanently ceases functioning, usually after a major traumatic injury or stroke. Ventilators and other machines keep the heart beating during special testing to tell […]
In operating rooms “the whole process stops” if someone sees a hint of trouble, and independent doctors are called to doublecheck the person really is dead, [Dr Ginny Bumgardner, an Ohio State University transplant surgeon] said. In her 30-year career, “I’ve never had a case where the original declaration was wrong.”
[Dr Daniel Sulmasy, a Georgetown University bioethicist] agreed problems are infrequent. But he said there’s wide variation in what tests different hospitals perform to determine if someone’s brain-dead, whether they’re a potential organ donor or not. Doctors are debating whether to add additional test requirements.
Some are calling for stricter criteria. Worryingly, others are doing the opposite.
Cardiologists at a New York hospital say we need to expand the definition of death so more organs can be donated –
The three cardiologists at Northwell Health in New York: Sandeep Jauhar, Snehal Patel, and Deane Smith wrote an article “Organs Are Too Rare. We Need a New Definition of Death.”
They argue for expanding the legal and medical definition of brain death to include patients who have permanently lost higher brain functions like consciousness, memory, intention, and desire, even if lower brainstem functions are working normally.
Here’s the thing, though: all of those are strictly internal states. How on earth can anyone else peek into someone else’s consciousness, short of some kind of mystic art like telepathy?
Lowering the bar for death to an eager-beaver surgeon’s ‘I Just Reckon’ hardly seems conducive to restoring trust in organ donation.
