No organ harvest without consent

Recently published on LifeSiteNews.com was an article stating that Sen. Dale Risinger of Peoria is pushing legislation that would allow doctors to harvest organs from citizens who have not explicitly given consent for the procedure. This would govern individuals age 18 and older.

"This is an important first step to getting a law in Illinois that helps us have more organ donors," said Risinger, a Republican. The bill is not in its final form.

Under the proposed legislation, individuals who wish to avoid donating their organs would have to explicitly opt out of donating their organs before becoming incapacitated. If passed, the law would be the first of its kind in America.

Vital organs such as the heart become unusable after an extended period of complete cessation of bodily functions. Therefore, "brain death" is used as a parameter to determine when an individual is extremely unlikely to recover, even as functions such as the heartbeat continue, so that usable organs may be removed.

But the flexibility of that definition has raised considerable controversy because of the wide disparities in hospitals' determinations of brain death.

This is not respectful of the body that God has created. And it is taking away our freedom of choice. Seems like the government wants to take away all our freedoms, even harvesting our organs, before we are dead.

Barbara Hoover

Dundee