Imminent Death Donation

I’m joined today by two special guests to discuss an unusual and ethically complex type of organ donation – imminent death donation, or IDD. As you’ll hear Thao Galvan explain in the episode, organ donation currently has three standard types: living donation, donation after brain death (a type of deceased donation in which the patient is declared brain dead, and thus legally dead), and donation after circulatory death, or DCD. In DCD, a patient who is not brain dead is removed from life support, but the heart keeps beating. If it takes the patient more than roughly 90 minutes to die, the organs may not be usable. IDD, or imminent death donation, attempts to prevent that, by retrieving non-vital organs (usually a kidney) for donation prior to the removal of life support. 

Thao Galvan is a transplant surgeon and professor of surgery at Baylor College of Medicine. Kathy Osterrieder is a retired financial analyst, who came to this issue after attempting, unsuccessfully, to donate the organs of her late husband, Robert Osterrieder, after making the difficult decision to remove him from life support. It is another first for the Taboo Trades podcast – the first time in over five years of recording that I’ve been unable to hold back the tears, as Kathy talks about what the experience was like for her family. 

Links

Host: Kimberly D. Krawiec, Charles O. Gregory Professor of Law, University of Virginia

Guests: 

Nhu Thao Nguyen Galvan, M.D., M.P.H., FACS, Associate Professor of Surgery, Baylor College of Medicine

Kathleen Osterrieder, Donor Family Member in Spirit, Retired Financial Analyst

Reading: 

The Difficult Ethics of Organ Donations From Living Donors, Wall St. J. (2016)

Let’s change the rules for organ donations — and save lives, Wash. Post (2019)

OPTN, Ethical considerations of imminent death donation white paper (2016)

Survey of public attitudes towards imminent death donation in the United States, Am. J. Transplant. (2020)

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