Explain why religious people may have problems with transplant surgery.
(3a) Explain why religious people may have problems with transplant surgery.
Transplant surgery is the use of organs taken from one person and put in to another person to replace an organ that is malfunctioning or diseased. A wide range of organs can be transplanted successfully for example hearts, livers and eye corneas, but there organs have to be compatible and drugs usually have to be used to prevent the donated organ being rejected by the host. There are two types of transplant surgery. One involves using organs from a dead person, and the other involves using the organs of a living person which they can live without for example bone marrow or single kidneys. Although transplant surgery is a last resort, it is still very affective and it provides people with hope. Non religious people in favour of transplant surgery would argue that, it is an affective method of curing fatal diseases like heart or kidney malfunction, and for improving people’s lives. It uses organs which would otherwise be buried or burned and it gives people a chance to help others after their death. So it brings life out of death.
For religious people, transplant surgery raises many difficult issues about our respect for the dead and beliefs in life after death and about the sanctity of life. The sanctity of life is the belief that God created the universe and therefore everything in it is a gift from God and is sacred, including the living and the dead which means that, God is the only one that can give and take life. The recent high profile case of the Siamese twins Mary and Jodie raised serious moral issues for Christian’s. Roman Catholic Christians argued that the surgeons were going to murder Mary and use some of her organs to save Jodie. They feel like this because they believe “medical intervention would be morally impermissible since God has give humankind the gift of life” because they believe that God has given humankind the gift of life and therefore only he has the right to take it. However other Christians supported the operation as Mary was killing Jodie by living of her organs. So they felt that that the surgeons were acting in defence of Jodie to save her life. They feel like this because they believe that doctors can not leave children to die if they have the means to save them. Also they are many problems about the scarcity of human organs. This means that in some extreme cases the organs and tissue of animals have to be used which again raises the issue of all life being sacred and God being the only one who can take it and give it. The scarcity of organs also causes them to be of great value which causes poor people in developing countries to trade in organs, for money to survive, to rich people in developed countries.