Congress Must Act to Save Wasted Organs

Each year millions of perfectly good human organs, well suited for organ transplants, are buried or cremated along with junk body parts. Ironically, at the same time that these are condemned to rot needlessly in their underground vaults, or in the case of cremation have their ashes strewn over some river or countryside, thousands of Americans who desperately need similar organs are forced to wait months or even years for similar life saving donations. Many times, they don’t arrive in time and a life is forfeited.

But what if? What if Congress suddenly awoke from its spineless ho-hum existence and passed a law that stated that heretofore every American’s body would become the property of the federal government immediately upon death. And that all such bodies would be subject to inspection and all suitable organs harvested before the bodies would be returned to the families for burial.

Immediately all waiting lists for organ transplants would become a thing of the past and many new life-saving transplants would be developed. Gone would be a family’s long agony as they awaited the availability of a vital organ to preserve the life of a loved one. Gone would be the risk of accepting a borderline organ in fear that a healthy one might not arrive in time. And gone would be the reluctance of doctors to accept older patients into a transplant program, preferring instead to selectively award rare organs to younger people with longer life expectancies.

Of course, this seemingly win-win situation would be met with loud objections from many religious groups and it would also run head on into violent protests from practitioners of nationalistic burial customs. And you could count on some people to object for a number of political reasons and maybe just because it seems to be the thing to do at the moment.

And you could expect Congress to react in its normal fashion: By allowing exception after exception and thus slashing the number of available organs and dooming the program to failure before it even got off the ground. But suppose, just suppose, that for some inexplicable reason, Congress suddenly found strength of character and decided that precious organs belonged in needy American bodies rather than be consumed by maggots or the fires of cremation. And suppose that because of this newfound strength it made this program the law of the land and saw to it that it was universally implemented.

Not only would this result in thousands of lives being saved but also in countless new medical procedures. We might even find the same organ could be transplanted again and again and thus achieve a sort of perpetual existence that would outlive the original donor by centuries.

Could all this happen? Will all this happen? Who knows? But suppose, just suppose.

GEORGE CHAMPAGNE

Greenville

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