![handle is hein.journals/chkjicl5 and id is 1 raw text is:
A DEADLY DILEMMA: THE FAILURE OF NATIONS' ORGAN PROCUREMENT
SYSTEMS AND POTENTIAL REFORM ALTERNATIVES'
Christy M. Watkins
I. INTRODUCTION
More than 80,000 people are currently awaiting life-saving transplants in the United
States.2 Of those waiting, approximately eighteen people die every day.3 Only thirty-five to fifty
percent of all potential donors consent to donation, resulting in numerous wasted organs.4
Robert Noel Test summarizes the true value and benefits of organ donation in his poem, To
Remember Me:
The day will come when my body will lie upon a white sheet neatly tucked under four
corners of mattress located in a hospital busily occupied with the living and the dying.
At a certain moment a doctor will determine that my brain has ceased to function and that,
for all intents and purposes, my life has stopped.
When that happens, do not attempt to instill artificial life into my body by the use of a machine.
And don't call this my deathbed. Let it be called the Bed of Life, and let my body be taken
from it to help others lead fuller lives.
Give my sight to the man who has never seen a sunrise, a baby's face or love in the eyes of a
woman.
Give my blood to the teen-ager who was pulled from the wreckage of his car, so that he might
live to see his grandchildren play.
Give my kidneys to one who depends on a machine to exist from week to week.
Take my bones, every muscle, every fiber and nerve in my body and find a way to make a
crippled child walk.
Explore every corner of my brain. Take my cells, if necessary, and let them grow so that
someday, a speechless boy will shout at the crack of a bat and a deaf girl will hear the sound
of rain against her window.
Burn what is left of me and scatter the ashes to the winds to help the flowers grow.
If you bury something, let it be my faults, my weaknesses and all prejudice against my fellow man.
To my little sister, Megan, and everyone else who knows what it is like to wait...
2 International Association for Organ Donation, Newsroom, at http://wwwiaod.org/newsroom-fact-sheetshtm (last
visited Feb. 4, 2004) [hereinafter Newsroom].
3 id.
4 American Medical Association, AMA testifies before Congress on organ donation motivation: Encourages study of
financial incentives, June 3, 2003, at h tp://www.ama-assn.or/anm/pub/article/161&7726.htm (last visited Jan. 24,
2004) [hereinafter AMA testifies].
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