Yeah, way to make people want to be organ donors. I'm willing to help someone who's got a bad kidney, but that? No way.
There's a big difference in giving up some body parts to save someone's life once you don't need them and getting sent to the glue factory to feed someone's vanity.
I mean, for a lot people, I imagine there isn't a difference. I'm going to remain an organ donor. It is said that Diogenes, when asked how he wished to be buried, left instructions to be thrown outside the city wall so wild animals could feast on his body. When asked if he minded this, he said, "Not at all, as long as you provide me with a stick to chase the creatures away!" When asked how he could use the stick since he would lack awareness, he replied "If I lack awareness, then why should I care what happens to me when I am dead?" At the end, Diogenes made fun of people's excessive concern with the "proper" treatment of the dead.
Is it a prion risk or other health concern? or just people being squeamish / worried about misuse e.g. "haha that apple you just ate was made out of my grandpa" type thing.
The silent component of the disgust behind what's happening in articles like this is the fear that medical professionals will see greater profit from letting you die than from saving your life.
I bet there are already cases like this, either in the US, or in the dystopia that is China.
Fuck, I mean, there's already people out there who drug people and harvest their kidneys in a bathtub of some dirty motel somewhere. If there are people doing this shit on the black market, then there's definitely sociopaths that would do this shit in the hospitals if they thought they could get away with it, which is just what the organ donor checkbox opens the door to.
Yes, the incentives are very perverse. What an average person considers 'dead' and what the organ harvesters consider dead are two completely different things [1].
Organ-carving doctors are desensitized to death. They don't care if you live or die, but they do care if they get to harvest your organs because those are worth a ton of money. I'm sure there's 100's if not 1000's of people getting carved up every year that could have been saved, but the incentives are to let the person die to harvest their organs.
Wouldn't the solution be to allow the family to get payments when the donated body was used for cosmetic surgery? Couldn't laws state that the donated bodies must go first to those in need, second to medical schools and science, and lastly to cosmetic procedures?
Besides, a small portion of those procedures are for valid purposes. Accidents, birth defects, and so forth.
Cosmetic surgery isn't necessarily a bad thing because you associate it with the word vanity. I hope you realize that appearance can be just as important psychologically in a life as a person that's needing surgery for other reasons.
There's a difference between burn victim "vanity" and Kardashian vanity. One isn't a bad thing, and the cosmetic surgery to relieve the physical and emotional trauma associated with such is necessary. The latter, however, is a sideshow brought to us via Comcast and Instagram.
There's a big difference in giving up some body parts to save someone's life once you don't need them and getting sent to the glue factory to feed someone's vanity.