...In response to the increasing number of protests from nurses and anesthesiologists, who sometimes react strongly to the movements of the supposed "corpse," and because these movements sometimes make it impossible to continue the operation, transplant surgeons have come to rely on the use of paralyzing drugs. These drugs are used in the same manner and dosages as with living patients, but here they are used in order to suppress signs of life--and in order to dissipate the protests and objections of the medical, nursing, and pastoral personnel who are increasingly uncertain that the organ donor is truly dead.The donor is treated and prepared for surgery in a way similar to any other living patient going to the operating room. After the removal of healthy vital organs, what is left is an empty corpse. Such removal is ethically unacceptable. It is the removal of the organs that changes the living person to a dead one.
Anyone familiar with the moment of death knows that once death has occurred, there is no more breathing, moving, grimacing, or squirming and that there is no longer a heartbeat or blood pressure. The argument of some physicians--that such movements in an organ donor are caused by "leftover energy" in the body--has no scientific validity. It is, therefore, unethical for transplantation surgeons to continue performing such procedures that mutilate a living human body. These procedures treat the donors as if they were artificially sustained biologic entities, rather than human persons worthy of dignity and respect...
(Source: "Are Organ Transplants Ever Morally Licit?" by Bishop Fabian Wendelin Bruskewitz, Bishop Robert F. Vasa, Walt F. Weaver, Paul A. Byrne, Richard G. Nilges, and Josef Seifert)
