Next target for arrogant, ignorant ‘experts’: organ donors

Of all America’s problems, waning trust in our institutions — and our institutions’ lack of trustworthiness — is among the biggest.

Case in point: organ donation.

Some have always worried that doctors might be a little too quick to declare them dead, in order to strip them of organs that might save other patients. 

(When I signed my first organ donor card at the age of 18, I added a handwritten postscript: Not until I’m good and dead.)

Turns out they weren’t being paranoid.

Last month The New York Times reported that under existing guidelines, “a growing number of patients” — some of them “gasping, crying or showing other signs of life” — are facing “premature or bungled attempts to retrieve their organs.”

This news was poorly received.

“This is horrifying,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. declared in response, as he demanded reforms. 

“The entire system must be fixed to ensure that every potential donor’s life is treated with the sanctity it deserves,” he said.

A recent federal investigation tallied more than 70 canceled organ removals in Kentucky alone “that should have been stopped sooner” because patients showed signs of revival —  that is, patients were clearly recovering yet were nonetheless being prepared for organ harvesting.

You would think the exposure of such sloppy practices would push transplant doctors into a full-court press to increase public confidence in their methods.

Instead, the organ-harvesting establishment is going the other way.

Shortly after the initial Times report, a trio of New York cardiologists, Drs. Sandeep Jauhaur, Snehal Patel and Deane Smith, wrote in its pages their idea to promote more life-giving transplants.

“We need to broaden the definition of death,” they explained.

Right now, they lectured, organs can only be harvested once a person has been declared dead — either because the heart has stopped, or because the brain has ceased to function while the heart is still beating.

Brain death leaves many organs in good shape because the heart is still supplying them with blood and oxygen, but it’s relatively rare: only 500 cases a year in New York state, they noted. 

Circulatory death, when the heart actually stops, is far more common, but it deprives organs of oxygen and makes them unsuitable for transplant.

“The solution, we believe, is to broaden the definition of brain death to include irreversibly comatose patients on life support,” the three doctors wrote — suggesting procedures that would briefly stop a patient’s heart long enough to declare him or her dead, then re-start it to permit the removal of ready-for-transplant organs.

Now, this is something on which reasonable people can disagree. 

On the one hand, freeing up more organs for transplant means that more lives can be saved, which is surely a good thing.

On the other hand, trust in the medical establishment — after the twin disasters of COVID policy and the destructive transgender fad — is at something like an all-time low. 

What, one may wonder, is an “irreversible” coma?

In fact, even the discussion of redefining death to promote transplants has struck a brutal blow to transplant availability. 

In the wake of the doctors’ column, Newsweek last week reported a “mass exodus from donor registries.” 

According to figures from the trade group that represents transplant-procurement agencies, thousands of Americans removed their names from donor lists in response to the coverage. 

One transplant group suffered a 700% increase in removals, while more than 2,400 people took their names off California’s registry, as did 950 in Florida and more than 600 in Colorado. 

“I am no longer a donor because of sociopaths like this,” one X user posted, commenting on the three doctors’ proposal — one of thousands of similar social-media declarations.

Oops.

The problem here is one of trust.  

We need to be able to trust our medical authorities to do the right thing. 

But five years after the COVID debacle upended our lives, and as young detransitioners grapple with the lifelong damage done by doctors who promised they could change their gender, many Americans believe, altogether reasonably, that medical authorities may not be all that worthy of our faith. 

Rather than redefining death itself to promote organ availability, the medical profession needs to come up with ways to rehabilitate its reputation so that people are more willing to trust them with their lives — and register to donate.  

At this point, that’s an uphill road. 

I’m wishing Kennedy and his associates all the luck in the world in turning this around, because they’ll need it.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.