I recently checked the organ donor box for my driver’s license. Is this acceptable in terms of Orthodox teaching? (June '02)
To understand the answer to this questions, we need to realize that, contrary to popular belief, our bodies and our lives are not our own. We have been bought for a price, the great price paid for our salvation by Jesus Christ. Our bodies are given to us by God and belong to Him. They house the Spirit of God, which gives us life, so that with both our bodies and our souls we may grow in our relationship with God. We are expected to return them to God in the same condition he gave them to us. Unfortunately, many of us abuse our bodies in numerous ways (i.e. eating disorders, obesity, smoking, abusing alcohol, becoming couch potatoes, etc). We are ruining that right relationship between our bodies/ ourselves and our God.
There are those in the Orthodox Church who would say that because of what you have read in the paragraph above that we should not donate our organs. What God has given us in our bodies should be given back to God. It is not our right to give parts of ourselves away. There is also the entire discussion (which we cannot go into here) about our society’s obsession with seeking immortality through science (and every anti-aging product on the market) – instead of accepting death as a part of life and a passage back to God.
While that may be one way to look at the issue, the Patriarchate of Antioch has taken the position that it may be acceptable for us to be organ donors. If the donation is a gift of love - for the sake of the life of another and not selling your kidney to pay for a new sports car – then this life-saving act is good and right and worthy of blessing. As we read Jesus words in the Gospel of St John (15:13), “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” That sacrifice for the love of another – most often a stranger – is accepted by some in the Church as the rationale for permitting organ donation.
As this all relates to the question of checking your Driver’s License to be an organ donor, I urge you NOT to do that. While doctors and hospitals are supposed to be ethical in not hastening a person’s death in order to harvest organs, the reality is that not all have proven to be ethical. (A world-class hospital the likes of the Cleveland Clinic faced criminal charges several years ago for such practices.) The reality is also that despite what you have put on your Driver’s License, in many states a family member will still be asked to sign papers giving the hospital permission to harvest organs.
The preferred practice would be to tell your family (parents or spouse) of your wishes, and put it in writing in a Living Will. Trust the people who know you the best to do what you feel to be right.