If you sign the organ donor card on your license, your loved ones have virtually no say what happens to you. The doctors make the decision. We’ve too often seen doctors a little too eager to bring death for the greater good to others.

Years ago, my father suffered a heart attack and the moment the doctor heard my dad had a touch of emphysema he decided this was end stage. We told him that he’d been working on the house the day before and the doctor ignored us. We said he’d walked two miles home from the car mechanic because he didn’t want to ask for help just the past week. He ignored us, saying we didn’t understand. He said my dad had been hiding how bad his illness was.

Interestingly, the doctors and nurses called the time of death. They know this because they were upping the pain meds until they knew it would kill him. So we demanded he be taken off all medications. The doctors balked. The nurses gave us attitude. Serious attitude. One nurse even lectured us that she thought we were cruel to our father. So that night we all prayed. And guess what? While we all went to the chapel, a nurse snuck in to the room to deliver morphine without our consent. WITHOUT CONSENT. So committed were they to death. She said it was a mix up but we knew. So then, the family had to sit watch. Someone stayed with my dad constantly just to make sure the medical staff wouldn’t kill him.

Two days later my father woke up. We arranged an ambulance to bring my father to another hospital. Nurses and doctors literally barred the way, refusing to let him out. It was insane. The ambulance driver said he’d seen this before and he announced, “I don’t work for you.” He then rammed my father’s bed through the blockade. And my father lived five more years. He walked three miles every day and ate healthy. He got to play with his grandchildren.

I have no idea why they were so committed to death but they were.

A Catholic priest writes at Padre Peregrine: Although I am a Catholic priest, I am also an ex-paramedic and I graduated pre-health from Boston College. I am writing this blog post “Why you should say no to organ donation on your driver’s license” as a former paramedic, not as a priest. In other words, this blog post will be practical medical advice for all readers Catholic or non-Catholic. There will be no overt Catholic bioethics below, except these two sentences: The Catholic Church has no problem with organ donation per-se. The problem is that certain organs are always cut out of living people, effecting a homicide for “good reasons.”

Although a liver or a cornea could be harvested from a cadaver for organ donation from a dead body, a heart is always cut out of a living body in first world countries. The term “Brain Death” was invented by a team of Harvard physicians to re-define death for this very purpose. So called “brain-death” essentially means that a patient has an active cardio-vascular system, but with reduced activity on the electroencephalogram (EEG.)

You see, an EEG measures electrical activity in the brain. This should not be confused with an electrocardiogram (EKG or ECG) which measures the electrical activity of the heart. Transplant surgeons prefer to cut the heart out of live patients with active EKGs (but minimal EEGs) because a heart that has stopped beating actually harms the tissue via something called a “hypoxic insult” to the tissue. Remember that the heart must beat oxygen-rich blood not only to the whole body, but to the heart itself.

In lay terms, Cardiac muscle goes so badly so quickly after the heart stops beating that transplant surgeons must find a way to anesthetize the patient so as to cut the heart out of that living body. It should be obvious that a dead body would not need anesthesia! But this sounds too creepy to exist without a cover. Harvard Medical invented the cover, “Brain Death” precisely so as to justify the harvesting of hearts from living people.

If you put “Yes” on your Driver’s License to organ donation, and if you were to sustain a Traumatic Brain Injury with no damage to your cardiovascular system, you would certainly be a prime candidate to have your heart cut out of your own living body (deemed brain dead because of a reduced EEG.)

The New England Journal of Medicine recently removed an article formerly found here where they admitted that transplant surgeons were cutting the hearts out of live patients. Their bioethical justification read word-for-word: “Many will object that transplantation surgeons cannot legally or ethically remove vital organs from patients before death, since doing so will cause their death. However, if the critiques of the current methods of diagnosing death are correct, then such actions are already taking place on a routine basis.”

Let me translate that into lay terms: “Some people may think it’s wrong to cut organs out of living people, and they might be correct, but it’s irrelevant because they’re simply too late to protest, since we’ve already been doing it for quite a while.”