Organ Donation: Act of Charity or Abuse of Human Dignity?

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 14:00:16 +0000

New York recently past a law requiring all citizens to be organ donors unless they opt out. While Catholic moral theologians are still debating the moral rightness of organ donation, in a culture of death this new law is more than problematic.

Catholic moral theologians debate the moral value of the organ donation because of the principle of totality and integrity, which states that the body should be kept whole unless the removal of a body part is necessary for the body’s overall health. This principle protects the dignity of the body as part of the human person. This philosophy of the human body stands at odds with other philosophies within our culture that see the body as a mere vessel for the spirit, or that see the human person as no more than a physical animal. There is also question about whether or not a human person is truly dead with the organs are harvested. Complete bodily death leads to the immediate deterioration of organs. Some organ donation advocates want to create a new category of “death” that allows for the harvesting of organs before the body is completely dead as long as it is reasonably certain that the patient will not regain consciousness and that the brain activity has fallen below a level defined as the standard for life. This places the value of the organ donor’s life below that of the organ recipient because the organ donor’s life is considered useless. The definition of brain death is debated among moral theologians.

Besides questions about the morality of organ harvesting in general, there is also the question about free will. If organ donation is deemed morally acceptable, it is because it is a free gift of one’s body for the good of another, and therefore an act of love. However, if organ donation is forced by law, this free act of love is diminished or even destroyed. Furthermore, our culture runs the risk of becoming utilitarian, judging one life against the other based on some standards of quality that are purely materialistic and that do not recognize the dignity and value of each human person.

Any way you look at it, the New York law is a problem. Yes, it could save lives by making more organs available for transplant, but only at the expense of devaluing other lives. It could put doctors in the position of making value judgments that determine that one person’s life has less value than another person’s. It could be one more step in the culture of death to devalue human personhood and to make life, our bodies, and our very lives into nothing more than a commodity for the highest bidder.

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Organ Donation: Act of Charity or Abuse of Human Dignity?

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