Interview on the radio about families in ethnic minorities in Britain, refusing to allow organs from dead relatives to be used for transplant, even when the dead person is on the donor register (i.e. gave at some point the consent for his or her organs to be used).
Interviewer: would you allow the organs from a relative to be used for a transplant to save someone else’s life?
Interviewee: No, a person should be buried whole.
Interviewer: Why?
Interviewee: To protect the sanctity of life.
Now I do not want to question somebody’s feelings when a loved one dies, nor religious beliefs they might hold (not here at least).
What I would question though is the logic of protecting the sanctity of life by not allowing somebody’s (a dead person, i.e. no life involved there) organs to be used for transplant potentially saving or much improving somebody else’s life. Maybe I do not understand the concept of “sanctity of life”, but I struggle to imagine how that applies to dead people.
Luca Rastello 