Abstract

Organ transplantation offers many people who suffer from organ failure a chance to live longer. The Catholic Church, which has endorsed organ donation if it is practiced in an ethically acceptable manner, requires that unpaired vital organs be donated only after the donor is certainly dead. In an effort to increase the number of viable organs, a procedure called donation after cardiac death was introduced in the 1990s. This procedure violates the Roman Catholic moral teaching on the dignity of human life because it violates the dead donor rule and undermines the dignity of the dying person. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 12.1 (Spring 2012): 55–65.