X-Message-Number: 2311 Date: Wed, 23 Jun 93 00:52:18 CDT From: Brian Wowk <> Subject: CRYONICS PA Law Kevin Brown: > I have appended below, with permission, a recent posting to the > Extropians list by Ray Cromwell concerning a proposed Pennsylvania > law that would be dangerous to cryonicists.... > PA Official to Alcor: "Gee, I'm sooooo sorry, but, after that car > accident, his bracelet was so badly damaged we could hardly read it, > and to ensure freshness of his organs, we had to harvest them immediately. > Not until now did we have a chance to call you. You can, of course, > have the leavings..." >>> Ray Cromwell: > This is a law being considered in PA. It states that unless you > specify otherwise, you are presumed to be an organ donor at death. > I see this as coming into conflict with cryonics -- with the state > eventually declaring ownership of your organs at death and carving up > your body.... Now wait a minute! Before we all go flying off the handle about a law we do not understand, let's make sure we all know how organ donation works. Victims of sudden death or terminal illnesses *are not* organ donation candidates. Transplant surgeons need organs with no ischemic time. In other words, nobody who suffers cardiac arrest before legal death is an organ donation candidate. You must be declared legally dead >>> with your heart still beating <<< before you can donate organs. In practice this means that the only people who donate organs are people on respirators who are declared brain dead. Consider a typical scenario: Joe Blow riding his motocycle without a helmet crashes and ends up on life support with severe head injuries. 48 hours later an extensive battery of tests determines that cerebral perfusion is zero, and brain stem activity is zero. Although Joe's heart and lungs continue to operate because of the respirator, his brain is literally mush. Joe is declared brain dead (i.e. legally dead). At another hospital, Joe Smith is dying from liver failure. The tissue types of the two Joe's match. Joe Blow's liver (now useless to him) could save Joe Smith's life. Unfortunately Joe Blow never bothered to sign his organ donor card. Doctors explain the situation to Joe Blow's family, and ask for permission to take his liver. The distraught, confused family (who still haven't come to terms with Joe's passing) refuse, and Joe Smith *dies* for lack of a liver. This scenario repeats itself over and over again everyday in hospitals all over North America. I, for one, am sick of it. Unless someone explicity states that they want to take their organs with them into the ground and rot, I don't think people should continue dying because families in the midst of grief and confusion lose the ability to make good decisions. Needless to say, I (a cryonicist) have a lot of sympathy for the proposed PA law. This law will not affect cryonicists one bit. Remember you have to be brain dead on a respirator for laws like this to come into effect. Cryonicists should never end up brain dead on a respirator because their Durable Power of Attorney for Heath Care and Medical Surrogate paperwork should specifically prohibit respirator support when there is no brain activity (in absence of drugs). Finally, and quite frankly, if despite these measures you ever are so unfortunate as to end up brain dead on respirator, cryonics will not do you one bit of good. --- Brian Wowk P.S. Kevin, please post this to the Extropians list. Thanks. [ I did. - KQB ] [ Brian, thanks for your clarification about how organ donation works. I still see a problem, though. Within the past year or so I spoke about organ donation with an emergency room nurse who works in Germany. She has seen the organ donation business from the inside, at least in Germany, and has seen that potential organ donors do NOT get life-saving treatments that they would otherwise get because some life-saving treatments can compromise the quality of the organs to be harvested. Because of this, she has written in large letters over the back of her drivers license that she is NOT an organ donor. Is the organ donation business in Canada and the USA so different than in Germany that such a problem never could happen here? That, I realize, is not specifically a cryonics-related issue. For cryonicists the main additional issue with "presumed donor" is, I think, that it may become too easy to "accidentally" lose a person's identification and, especially, that inconvenient cryonics bracelet. The Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care and Medical Surrogate paperwork will be useless if the organ harvesters arrange matters so that the appropriate people are not contacted quickly. "Hey, we have a noname on respirator with some good organs. Let's get him pronounced and carve him up!" It will be interesting to see how well the proposed PA law discourages abuses like that. - KQB ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=2311