Despite the common misconception, the dead donor rule is not by any means a piece of legislation. It is an ethical tool that has helped to manage the organ procurement and transplantation system since its beginning. People believe that violating it could not only decrease the number of organ donations but would normalize the devaluing of human life. Even so, there are inconsistencies in its argument that make people question its relevance. However, the ambiguity of the matter should not be a factor when informed consent is involved. Once a person is pronounced dead by legal standards, regardless of the state in which said person remains, if proper consent was attained from all parties involved, organ removal should be permitted both legally and ethically.
Technology is now leaps and bounds ahead of where it once was. It is believed that the earliest cases of organ transplantation were in medieval times and were
…show more content…
They focused only on local patients as well. This proved to be a problem for a few reasons. One being that, "if an organ couldn’t be used at hospitals local to the donor, there was no system to find matching candidates elsewhere"(UNOS, How We Began section para 1). That meant that numerous viable organs were wasted because they could not find a recipient in time. It was the South-Eastern Organ Procurement Foundation (SEOPF) that sought to do something about this problem. In 1977 a database was created with a list of organ recipients ad organs. This would help them find matches for organs that they could not use locally. This became known as the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS). The number of organ transplants continued to increase as more organs became widely available. In 1984 the National Organ Transplant Act established the need for an official national network to oversee organ procurement and recipients, i.e.