The Nasty Side of Organ Transplanting
Second Edition
Norm Barber
Copyright
Chapter 14
Language Use And Gender Donor Rate
Like all trades and professions transplant promoters develop their own language to mask aspects of their business they don’t want outsiders to know. Here is a small sample.
Transplant Industry Description General Public Language Use
Smoked Herring Cadaver soaked in formaldehyde
Mixed grill Harvesting of kidney, liver and heart
Retrieve organ Harvest, cut out, excise, extract organ
Heart-Beating Cadaver Brain injured human
predicted to die and
classed as "brain dead"
Tissue Tendons, muscle, fascia
De-coupling Relatives agreeing the brain
injured person with the
beating heart is dead
and have consented to harvesting
Transplant Awareness Accepting the transplant
industry beliefs and not
asking questions
Brain Dead Brain dead or part of
the brain is dead, another part is functioning
and another part is
dormant
"to offer families the
opportunity to make their Pressuring relatives to allow
own decision about donation" Harvesting
We need to know We demand to know
Reduced Status of Intending Donors
The body parts industry had to develop a new language to disguise the fact they were cutting up and killing patients who still showed signs of life. It was a question of reducing the donor patients’ status to heart-beating cadaver much sooner than is the case for non-donor patients retaining their organs upon death.
When an organ-retaining patient dies hospital staff treat that patient’s body with continued respect first designating it as the deceased. As the cooling body becomes less human and loosens its bowels it is called a corpse. When the stiffness of rigor mortis sets in the status is reduced to cadaver, something quite and absolutely dead.
The status of a dying organ donor descends much quicker. Despite the patient making what is perhaps a magnificent final gesture, surgeons and transplant coordinators label the organ donor as the "heart-beating cadaver" immediately brain death is declared. This "cadaver" status is used despite the body staying warm, soft, pink, moist, and retaining a beating heart and, frequently, some brain activity and function.
If the “brain dead” donor was an organ retainer he or she would still be treated as alive and washed, fed and talked to by nurses and doctors. When surgical staff have to excise a beating heart they have to pretend, for their own psychological well being, that the patient is stone cold dead.
Refusal To Differentiate Between Cardiac Dead
and Brain Dead Donors
Donor Promotion Agencies sensed the danger of people differentiating between “cardiac dead” donors and "brain dead" donors. They couldn’t let people see the difference between the conditions because one would obviously seem less dead than the other. So they adopted the term "Dead Donor" meaning both cardiac dead and "brain dead". They then restricted the term, "Living Donor", to those walking around and expected to remain alive after the donation. This was to prevent the obvious becoming apparent – if a totally dead person was the same as a brain dead person then why was there such a huge difference between the two?
The criteria for determining brain death have become secondary to who wants the body and for what purpose. When the patient’s body is wanted by harvesters they adopt a descending logic that goes like this: Loss of function = loss of ability to function = brain dead = really dead. In mathematics this illogic would appear like 4=3=2=1.
In determining this descent, “Doctor’s Orders” no longer refer to “staying in bed and drinking plenty of fluid", but that the patient is dead because the doctor certifies the patient as dead. Doctor’s Orders determine if the donor still has human rights or will be treated as a "cadaver".
Allograft in USA means Homograft in Australia meaning the body part is from Homo sapiens. The term Homograft is not used in the United States because Americans call gays “homos” and this might put people off
Gender Donors
In Spain 67% of donors are males while 33% are females. In Austrlaia and New Zealand it is 61% males and 39% females. USA has 60% males, 40% females while Sweden has 59% males and 41% females.
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