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I'm saying this assuming the absolute best faith of the medical people. Hospital doctors are forced, day in and day out, to be exposed to people who need trans

I'm saying this assuming the absolute best faith of the medical people. Hospital doctors are forced, day in and day out, to be exposed to people who need transplants. The entire medical system is forced to be exposed to totally, completely innocent people who, through cruel fate alone, need to wait for a suitable someone to die. In a sense, these innocent people's lives are halted in a way that can be argued to be a death themselves. Doctors, who are human beings with empathy (so much so they are at risk of killing themselves from all the suffering they're exposed to) are day in and day out forced to face this insane fateful cruelty. These doctors see the miracles an organ transplant can do. Give back a single mother her ability to raise her children. Allow the opportunity for a father to see the birth of his child. Enable a child to envision a future for themselves for the first time in their life. So when someone else is dead, or basically dead, occurs, each doctor knows that this one death can relieve the "deaths" of dozens of other needy and completely innocent people. Especially when the doctor is confident that, effectively, the soul has already left the body and the organ that actually contains our consciousness has died. The family members can be excused as ignorant folks who, unlike doctors, don't get to witness firsthand how much suffering can be relieved by harvesting an already-basically-dead person. In a situation like that, a doctor can very easily make what they believe to be the moral choice in attempting to persuade a family towards organ harvesting even though they may personally be unrelated to anyone who needs an organ.

ceejayoz 3y ago
> The family members can be excused as ignorant folks who, unlike doctors, don't get to witness firsthand how much suffering can be relieved by harvesting an already-basically-dead person. And honestly, a bit of ignorance is to be expected here. Most people have never been in the room with a brain-dead person on life support; it's a brand-new scenario to almost anyone. The docs will have seen and heard stuff like "She is without a doubt responding to my touch..." and "Brain dead patients cannot respond to touch, and she clearly is… right?" from people. They know the reasons - confirmation bias on random movements, body reflexes, etc. - but explaining that to someone in the midst of the worst grief of their lives is... tough.

ceejayoz 3y ago

> The family members can be excused as ignorant folks who, unlike doctors, don't get to witness firsthand how much suffering can be relieved by harvesting an already-basically-dead person. And honestly, a bit of ignorance is to be expected here. Most people have never been in the room with a brain-dead person on life support; it's a brand-new scenario to almost anyone. The docs will have seen and heard stuff like "She is without a doubt responding to my touch..." and "Brain dead patients cannot respond to touch, and she clearly is… right?" from people. They know the reasons - confirmation bias on random movements, body reflexes, etc. - but explaining that to someone in the midst of the worst grief of their lives is... tough.