Q09159

Should all New Zealanders be organ donors?

In this modern world we can cure a lot of infections and dieses, however we can not heal all wounds which means we need to replace the tissue and organs that the dieses and accidents damage so we rely on people’s generosity before or after their death to donate these. Although we have good numbers of donors we still do not have enough, we also have major flaws in our current system which ignores the donor’s decision and only listen to the family, and we will also look at why the objections of people,s way of life present are invalid.

In New Zealand we currently have 10 donors per million of the population. This may seem good to Japan’s 0.4, however Spain’s 34 and Portugal’s 31 are far better and put us to shame.We just do not have enough donors. In New Zealand we have 400 people awaiting organs. A few of these will get lucky but a lot will die. In my opinion why not sign up for donation? You could save or raise the quality of life for up to ten people.

Our current donor system is seriously flawed. Even if it says the word “donor” on someone’s drivers licence it is not even looked at. The family of the deceased is asked instead and it comes down to there decision. To add to that it is not majority rules, if its fifteen saying yes and just one saying no the procedure can not go ahead. This is not right it should be the deceased decision is final, no matter with the family says. However until this happens make sure your family knows what you want to do and hopefully they will understand.

Some people have excuses not to become a donor, such as I forgot or I didn’t know. There are also others which are more justifiable like I think it is an unsafe procedure, however this is wrong with lowest percentage of success being 80% for lung transplants and the highest being liver transplants with an 95% chance of success. Another excuse is that it is against some people’s religion to be bury without there body full intact, but if gods were truly divine being wouldn’t they believe in using perfectly good organs and tissue to give life or raise the quality of life for other people. Also the now useless organs could be given back to the family of which the good organ came from to be buried with the body. Why not let something good come out of such a bad situation.

For these reasons all New Zealanders should sign up for organ donation, we may already have good statistics but we can make these better if the government changed the law to take the flaws out of our current law and now we know the reasons some people don’t are invalid. Now lets all go give life because one day someone we know may need an organ or tissue donation.