The will to give life after death – El Financiero

In the 2021 annual report of the National Transplant Center of the Ministry of Health, which contains consolidated statistics on the number of donors, recipients or individuals requiring a vital organ to be donated, and completed transplants, a constant growth in the number can be seen. of surgical interventions carried out in public and private hospitals since 1992 –with the exception of those carried out during the pandemic–, as well as, unfortunately, a clear deficit balance between the number of individuals who make up the lists of those who need an organ and the number of possible donors who, having anticipated their will in life, facilitate the transplant of vital organs in favor of the previous ones.

For example, by the fourth quarter of 2021, 17,299 people made up the list of those waiting for a kidney; 5,259 those waiting for a cornea; and 238 those waiting for a liver, to mention the most outstanding and important organs. However, as can be seen in the same document, throughout the previous year a total of 1,971 kidney transplants were performed; 2,290 corneal transplants; and 135 liver. In the case of corneal transplantation, it also highlights the fact that some of the transplanted corneas were imported, thanks to donors abroad.

The General Health Law contemplates clear provisions that define what a transplant is, what are the powers of the health authorities in the matter of transplants, what are the obligations that hospitals must attend to throughout a transplant process, as well as the figure itself organ donation between living or deceased persons, through any of two mechanisms: express or tacit.

Despite the fact that there has been great progress in organ transplantation, there is still a serious lag in the field, given the lack of culture and citizen education, by virtue of which people are explained and made aware of the importance of donate life The total demand is not satisfied in almost 50 percent of the cases, depending on the body in question and the state entity in which the requesting individual resides.

Our legislation is advanced, to the extent that it already incorporates the tacit donation of organs, such as that which is specified in those cases in which the donor had not expressed his refusal during his lifetime, and provided that his spouse or partner, their descendants or ascendants, siblings, adopter or adoptee, grant concurrent consent.

It is curious and fortunate the way in which the legislator rewarded the right to life over a primary right to dispose of one’s own body, subordinating the use of the organ, of course, to the fact that the donor who takes advantage of an organ by tacit consent have passed away.

Last Sunday, the Helvetic Confederation submitted to the vote of its citizens an initiative that focuses on this same issue, in which it contemplates the replacement of express consent to organ donation by an advance tacit will. Despite the fact that it was a citizen initiative, it ended up becoming an official initiative from the moment in which the broad tacit donation was replaced by a donation subject to the granting of concurrent consent from a family member, in a similar way to the contemplated by our General Health Law.

The parties of the Christian Union questioned the validity of the initiative from the perspective of a human right to self-determination and protection of bodily integrity, given the important ethical dilemma posed by the approval of this mechanism of state substitution at the will of the individual. In the end, the human right to oppose the use of one’s own tissues and organs was always protected, subject to expressing it in writing while alive.

The initiative in favor of tacit consent prospered and will be able to advance the remaining part of the legislative process necessary for it to become a law in that Central European country.

Two aspects stand out significantly from this case that caught our attention last weekend: the solid functioning of a very well-built citizen democracy, in which political deliberation assumes serious and transcendent questions with absolute respect in favor of dissenting voices; and, the serious dilemma that all the discourse in favor of life has implicit around antagonistic criteria supported by judicial bodies around the world, in which, in relation to the right to life of the unborn, it has been privileged, in instead, the individual right to the destiny that the mother wants to give to her own body.

Due to the growing number of organ requesters, as well as the scientific possibilities to carry out a surgical process for the use of transplanted human tissues, from living and dead patients, it would be very interesting to imagine what regulatory and government advances could be carried out. to carry, later, this beneficial medical, political and social figure, which ends up translating into the prolongation of life and health for many people, of all ages.

The implementation of measures in the field of communication, through the creation of more agile information networks on the authorization of transplantable organs, as well as hospital measures that facilitate the hospitalization and urgent care of patients subject to a transplant process, will continue to build the success story that our country has been building around this process of transplanting life.

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