[alexhaefner]

Leslie sharpe is an ethnographer who wrote a whole book on organ donation after studying the topic called Strange Harvest. This article speaks to a lot of unnecessary and selfish criticism of organ donation practices. Doctors work very hard to ensure the patient is brain dead. There are a lot of reasons covered in the book about why it would make sense for doctors not to notify family members of what is about to happen to the dead body. The number one reason is that organ donation usually comes about from traumatic death, and it is often very difficult for the families to accept that the person truely is dead. Furthermore, the closer to death you can harvest the organs, the higher likelihood that the organ transplant will succeed. If the family has a decision in what happens to the dead body they might try to delay the process as they grieve and as they try to come to terms with the body truly being dead, and this can hurt the likelihood of success for organ transplantation.