The
Catholic Weekly
Online
Sydney
18 January 2004
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Organ donor plea
By Marilyn Rodrigues
The Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, has asked priests in the archdiocese to encourage their parishioners to consider organ donation.
“ Transplants of donated organs can give seriously ill people new life and hope,” he said in a recent letter to parish priests.
“ Please encourage your parishioners to consider organ donation.”
Currently, 4.7 million Australians are listed on the Australian Organ
Donor Register.
But according to Lifelink, the organ donation network in NSW and
the ACT, more are needed, as approximately one in six people who
could
be saved by a donation dies before a matching organ becomes available.
The problem is that there is an increasing number of people who are medically able to be saved with an organ transplant and yet the donor numbers in Australia have remained constant over the last decade.
Ben McGuire, an advocate of organ donation, says it is extremely
important for intending donors to make their choice known to family
members with
whom the final decision rests.
At least four people, maybe more, benefitted from his brother Frank’s
decision after he died from a brain hemorrage at age 35.
“ There were three of us boys; all close in age, and when we got our drivers’ licences there was a conversation around the dinner table about ticking the boxes for organ donation on the application form.
“
We discussed it as a family and everybody volunteered for it.
“
After Frank died we felt a sense of pride and some consolation that people
were being helped,” he said.
“
I would encourage people to discuss it with their relatives. I think
lots of people join the organ
donation register and don’t talk about it, but we did.
“
It meant that a time when we had to deal with a tragic situation we did
not also have to deal with the moral and ethical questions around organ
donation.
“
We knew what had been Frank’s decision and it was our job to support
it.”
In his encyclical letter, Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II suggested that one way of nurturing a genuine culture of life “is the donation of organs, performed in an ethically acceptable manner, with a view to offering a chance of health and even of life itself to the sick who sometimes have no other hope”.
He called the act of organ donation a “genuine act of love”.
For information on organ and tissue donation and transplants, call the Australian Organ Donor Register on 1800 777 203.