HOW TO TALK ABOUT DONOR ORGANS

~ Posted by Simon Willis, February 14th 2012

When talking about organ donation, you need to pick your words carefully. Yesterday, Dr Tony Calland, chair of the British Medical Association’s Medical Ethics Committee, went on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme to discuss the BMA’s new proposals to increase organ donation in Britain. These include “elective ventilation”, where people declared dead after brain-stem tests are ventilated so that, in Calland’s words, their organs are kept in “prime condition so that they could be, sort of, obtained by the transplant retrieval team when they come along”. He went on to talk of the human body as having “important spare parts”.

Dr Calland hopes, quite rightly, to extend the debate about how we solve the chronic shortage of donated organs. With a subject as controversial as this, it's tempting to look for a neutral vocabulary. But synonyms for “obtain” include “acquire” and “procure”, and “retrieving” suggests you are taking back something that was yours in the first place.

This kind of bureaucratic vocabulary is found in Kazuo Ishiguro’s science-fiction novel “Never Let Me Go”, where children are cloned for the purpose of donating organs to "originals", or non-clones. At one point donation is referred to as "unzipping". The children's duties end when they “complete”, or die. Ishiguro's novel is a powerful example of how issues of life, death and organ donation are obscured by euphemism.

Examples help here. The first heart transplant only took place in 1967 and most people have no direct experience of the issues involved. In response to a review by Ian Hacking of a book about organ transplants, someone from Dundee University Medical School described elective ventilation. The patient, she wrote, "will have good colour and be breathing clearly, so that he looks more alive than dead. The family are not being asked for permission to turn off the machine, but to keep it going so that the organs can be removed by surgery." She then quoted the mother of such a donor. "Do you know the worst thing about saying 'yes' to a transplant?" the mother said. "You’re not there when he dies. You leave the room with him alive. There’s no end."

Simon Willis is apps editor of Intelligent Life and a former associate editor of Granta