'When doctors cut her open to take her organs, they found her heart was still beating.'
Libby Emmons: A report out from The New York Times confirms what many people fear when it comes to being an organ donor in the United States: sometimes medical professionals will value your organs more than your life. People across the US have experienced "rushed or premature attempts to remove their organs," including from patients who were crying or showing other signs of life.
Per the Times: "The Times found that some organ procurement
organizations — the nonprofits in each state that have federal contracts
to coordinate transplants — are aggressively pursuing circulatory death
donors and pushing families and doctors toward surgery. Hospitals
are responsible for patients up to the moment of death, but some are
allowing procurement organizations to influence treatment decisions.
"Fifty-five medical workers in 19 states told The Times they had
witnessed at least one disturbing case of donation after circulatory
death. Workers in several states said they had seen coordinators
persuading hospital clinicians to administer morphine, propofol and
other drugs to hasten the death of potential donors."
The way the number of transplants was increased was through a change in
how death was quantified. The patients who are most likely to be
prematurely targeted for their organs are people who are in a coma, have
some brain function, are on life support, but are not expected to
recover. This practice is called "donation after circulatory death."
That kind of organ donation resulted in a full third of the organs
donated in 2024, about 20,000 total. This is a stark increase from the
number of donated organs just five years prior.
Such was the case, the Times found, with 42-year-old Misty Hawkins of
Alabama, who had choked to death. When doctors cut her open to take her
organs, they found her heart was still beating. In New Mexico, a woman
was regaining consciousness while doctors made plans to harvest her
organs. She eventually did regain consciousness. In Florida, a man was
removed from life support despite crying and biting on his breathing
tube as they did so. A paralyzed West Virginia man was asked by
coordinators for permission to harvest his organs as he was waking up
from surgery.
A Kentucky man who had been declared brain dead woke up on the operating table
in 2021 as surgeons were about to divvy up his organs and give them to
someone else. A federal investigation found that a non-profit that works
to procure organs for those who need them actually pushed hospital
workers to go and try to take the man's organs while he was still in
need of them.
It turns out that this man was not the only patient whose life was
callously disregarded by the non-profit. That non-profit, responsible
for coordinating the logistics between organ donor, hospital, and organ
recipient, had pushed for premature removal in dozens of cases. A
federal investigation found that in 73 cases, "officials should have
considered stopping sooner because the patients had high or improving
levels of consciousness." While some of those patients did die, others
recovered and left the hospital.
About 170 million people
are registered as organ donors in the United States and in many states,
a person can opt in to be an organ donor and have that appear on their
driver's license or non-driver ID card. Those who opt to be organ donors
may have their organs save lives or those organs may be used for
medical research.
There are over 100,000 people on the national transplant list waiting
for an organ and over 48,000 organ transplants were done in the US in
2024. Most people who need organs, nearly 90,000, are in need of
kidneys. About 10,000 need a liver, 3,500 need a new heart.
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