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a person may be able to provide materially for family members or worthy organizations after death. But what about organ donation? Can, or should, a person show love in death not merely by giving spiritual or material gifts to others, but also by agreeing to give a part of one’s own body in order to save another’s life? Once again, my purpose is not to resolve public policy disputes, but to examine how a Christian should approach bioethics as part of the broader moral calling of the Christian life. Christians nevertheless have a right to contribute to public policy discussions, and they should thus be aware that many difficult public policy issues exist concerning transplantation. Some of these issues involve matters of supply and demand. How can we procure more organs in order to alleviate long waiting lists for available organs? Should we seek to obtain more organs through free market mechanisms, or perhaps by taking organs from corpses whether or not the person gave consent during life? What is a just way to allocate the organs that are harvested; in other words, how do we decide who receives the organs that become available? How do we prevent the flourishing of black markets in organ donation and reception? Should we pursue xenograft transplants (i.e., harvesting organs for human beings from animals)? In addition to these matters of supply and demand there is the lingering public policy question of when a person should be considered dead. Since it is generally agreed that whole-organ transplants must be taken only from those who have died, how we define the moment of death (in terms of whole-brain, higher-brain, or cardio-pulmonary criteria) is crucial, especially since time is of the essence in harvesting organs from the dead in order to prevent the organs from becoming unusable through the process of ischemia. (I will address the issue of when death occurs in chapter 9.) Here our concern is with the narrower question of whether individual Christians may or even should agree to become organ donors. It is possible that someday the transplantation system will condone certain sorts of practices that would cause Christians, even if they are not opposed to transplantation in principle, to avoid becoming organ donors or recipients. In the American context today, however, the law prohibits most of the practices that Christians might find most problematic, such as taking whole organs from those who are still alive, taking organs from those who did not give consent (either personally or through their family), experimenting with xenograft transplants,
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