Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Health & Body

Soft-contact safety questions
A new study shows a higher risk of infection with soft contacts, especially if worn overnight.
By Dawn MacKeen
[07/19/99]

Urge
White-collar gay porn stars
By day they have high-paying, respectable jobs, but on nights and weekends they seek the fame that only money shots can bring.
By Jared Mitchell
[07/19/99]

My antidepressant made me do it!
The Hartman estate says Zoloft was to blame for a murder-suicide.
By Rob Waters
[07/19/99]

Urge
Episode 3: The rules
When it comes to keeping a romance going, there's nothing like a big white lie.
By Tracy Quan
[07/19/99]

Urge
Stranger in a super-friendly land
On the planet of polyamory, eager-beavers and boneheads mingle with truly enlightened souls.
By Lady Chimmerly
[07/17/99]

Complete archives for Health & Body

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Mike Perry

July 21, 1999 | When highway robbers killed Reg and Maggie Green's 8-year-old son during a family vacation in Italy in 1994, the couple found themselves whisked from a holiday outing to the waiting room of a Messina hospital. A neurosurgeon informed them that their son, Nicholas, was brain-dead. Faced with a decision every parent dreads, the Greens were about to set in motion events that would become known worldwide as the Nicholas effect. In his recent book of the same name, Reg describes the moment:

Then one of us -- we don't remember which, though, knowing her, I'd guess Maggie -- looked at the other and asked, "Now that he's gone, shouldn't we give his organs?"

"Yes," said the other and that's all there was to it. We told the doctors and signed the forms and left. It was the least difficult major decision either of us had to make: The boy we knew was not in that body anymore.

On the face of it, organ donation seems so proper -- so right -- that we need only be reminded of it the way we might remind a child to share his M&Ms. Even the tag line on the Coalition for Donation Web site sounds like a mother's gentle admonition: "Remember, share your life."

But beneath the skin of sunny catch phrases is a turbid soup of moral, ethical, psychological and spiritual unease. According to Reg Green, 90 percent of Americans favor organ donation -- but given the opportunity, only 30 percent actually follow through. The Coalition on Donation puts the number closer to 50 percent, but the drop-off is still steep. Something is holding us back.

For some people, organ sharing violates sacred beliefs. Romany Gypsies have traditionally believed that after death, the soul retraces its steps, and because the soul maintains its physical shape, the body must remain intact; certain Native American tribes hold similar beliefs. In Japan, Shinto worshipers regard the dead body as impure and dangerous, and regard injury to the body as a serious crime. Still, nearly all the major religions of the world endorse organ donation. The drop-off between belief and action occurs elsewhere, in that place where we are forced to confront issues of bodily integrity and human solidarity. This confrontation originates with the individual, but often extends to family members left behind to make organ donation decisions.

"There are, I think, some deep feelings of revulsion about organ donation," says Reg Green. "I quote a man in the book whose wife died. When his daughter suggested that they donate her organs, he said, 'Hasn't your mother suffered enough?'"

I have a friend who has worked as an emergency room nurse for years. She is a firm believer in organ and tissue donation, and has been actively involved in events promoting donor awareness. And yet, she tells me, she could never allow the harvest of her children's eyes. "Those eyes show me their souls," she says. "I cannot think of them without their eyes."

Another experienced nurse said the same thing about donating her own eyes. "I know that the body is not going to know a thing, but the idea of scooping the eyes out just seems so ugly -- it makes me uneasy. I can't agree to it." When her grandfather accidentally severed his finger, he had it placed in his burial plot so that "all his parts" would be in one place when he died. As nurses actively involved in organ harvest, they may hold contradictory positions, but those positions come from powerful places.

Next page | "We aren't cars -- you can't part us out!"