Comments on Secondhand Smoke: Your 24/7 Seminar on Bioethics and the Importance of Being Human: Age Discrimination in Organ Transplantation?

Good point. I stand corrected :D

2007-02-14T11:23:00.000-08:00

Good point. I stand corrected :D

I have to tell this story because I'm not eloquent...

2007-02-13T14:55:00.000-08:00

I have to tell this story because I'm not eloquent enough to make the point that it does:

I saw this on televison many years ago. A young man had been killed in an auto accident and his family, still grieving, let the doctors have his heart for a transplant (don't know if they used all his organs or if they just donated his heart). I do know that the recipient of the heart was an older, much older man, and that the parents were chagrined that this old guy should have their young son's heart, like, "Why did we give it up to someone who's not going to live much longer anyway?"

The old man was in a bank one day and someone came in to rob it - forcing everyone down on the floor. I don't recall if it was a group or just one person, but I do remember that the old man, with his new healthy heart, felt compelled to do something, and successfully tackled the man with the gun, and wrested it from him.

So this old man whom the parents thought was a waste of their son's gift saved a bank full of people from a nut-job with a gun.

We shouldn't look at a person's age... people who put their lives to good use and who live in the present, and live fully - those people shouldn't be judged because they're young or old. Anybody can do anything.

It is a hard call to decide something like this, m...

2007-02-12T15:45:00.000-08:00

It is a hard call to decide something like this, made all the harder, by our cultures unwillingness to recognise that life does come to an end at some point.

It seems reasonable if there is a shortage of organs to take into account how long the person getting the organ will likely live for. That does seem like a reasonable use of resources.

Yet I agree with your concern about this being the same as telling old people that there lives are worthless and that they should just hurry up and die.

Unfortunately a very reasonable approach to triage on the one hand could quite easily become the evil and horrendous idea of the worthlessness of the eldery on the other without too much difficulty.

Given our cultures obsession with youth I think bad things will happen from doing this. What happened to regarding the old as wise ?