Two takes on federally-funded organ harvesting

There's a crisis in the medical world, and no, it's not the new health-care legislation that just passed. The crisis revolves around a lack of materials buried deep within you - organs. And guess who's come along to help relieve you of said organs - that's right, the government.

Using a grant from the Department of Health and Human Services, a program has started in Pittsburgh where organ donors in the ER identified as beyond saving are prepped for organ transplantation while they're still on the table. Doctors now have the right to harvest organs from donor patients whose hearts stop beating - even if they're not declared brain dead.

Cruel, yes, but this procedure, called donation after cardiac death, has become a sad necessity because of government intervention. You see, organs can only be donated by either live persons willing to give them up, or the freshly dead who signed the back of their drivers license. A sizable number of organs come from the latter, but the problem is that those organs only have a short amount of time for harvesting before they're deemed useless. The body containing the organ has to be taken from the scene, put on a table, cut open, have the desired organ carefully removed through surgery, preserved in either chemicals, ice, or both and transported in a few hours. It's very rare to find an organ donor lying in a hospital with the needed organs perfectly intact and on their deathbed, so it's understandable if doctors wish to take stock before the patient is declared brain dead.

But this raises the concern that doctors will not try all they can to save a patient's life in order to harvest organs. Organizers claim doctors won't check if the patient on their table is an organ donor until after they've died. Even if that's true, it'll be in the back of the doctor's mind that the dying person on their table could be a potential donor with healthy organs that other people could use.

Thousands of people die each year waiting for organs such as kidneys, livers, hearts and bone marrow. And while the willingness to donate seems to be going up, the demand for organs has skyrocketed five times within two decades. So why is there a huge discrepancy? Because there's no incentive to give up a kidney while you, and your kidney, are in perfectly good shape.

But say you were offered $15,000 for a kidney or for some of your bone marrow (which grows back) and you took it up. Fair trade? One would think, but you just committed a felony punishable by five years in prison. That's right, you cannot profit from giving up an organ so another person may live. Rather, the patient in desperate need of a kidney transplant must wait for someone else to either die, or donate, so they don't die themselves. Thousands lose the waiting game.

It's important to note just how infantile the organ trade currently is - it's limited to a very generous few and some scientific developments, such as stem cell research. The latter could help save millions of lives, but politics, again, gets in the way of allowing people to live. So instead of scientific progress, or giving incentives for giving an organ, we're stuck with government mandated charity. And one cannot live off charity alone.