Summaries—theshocker69

1. Who Gets Priority When It Comes To Transplants?

We are raised in a society where we learn that all lives are precious and equal. So it only seems counterintuitive that our hospitals would seem to worry about the lives of adults more than the lives of children.

If a 10 year old child is put on an adult waiting list for an organ, they are automatically put as the lowest priority. Even though she is a deathly ill patient, she is treated as the lowest priority. Why is this age distinction necessary if no one life is greater than another? As of right now, there are over 100,000 people waiting on organ donation lists with a new person being added every 10 minutes. Every day, 79 people at the top of the list receive an organ while 18 people die because they didn’t receive one. So what are the odds that this 10 year old child, at the bottom of the donation list, will receive the organ that she needs?

To choose who get’s priority on the adult list, doctors weigh how physiologically compatible the organ is to the donor, the donor’s medical urgency, and estimate how long they will survive after they receive their organ. For children, priority is chosen by who has been on the list the longest and who has the strongest match.

If we are going to preach equality and talk about how all lives are equal, perhaps we should take the time to practice what we preach.

2. Do Tom’s Shoes Really Help People?

We all know the company “Tom’s.” They sell shoes that will fall apart after a month, but for every pair of shoe they sell, they give away a pair to a child in Africa. This sounds great, until you learn that they’re doing it for their own gain.

Tom’s says that their shoes promote education. In most Somali schools, you are not allowed to enter unless you have shoes. Tom’s makes it sound like without them, these children would not be able to attend school. However, these schools also hand out shoes to children, a majority of who already own shoes. Upon first glance, Tom’s seems like they are doing the right thing, but upon closer inspection, it is quite clear that the company only wants your sympathy for sales.

It seems counterintuitive for a company to lie about the charity that it delivers. However, although it may not be ethical, the technique that they utilized definitely is the reason they are where they are today.

3. Belgium: Senate Approves Measure Allowing Doctors to Euthanize Children

It seems counterintuitive that we would allow governments to make decisions regarding our own body. You must believe that you don’t own your own body and that the government has better insight into what you should and shouldn’t do. It’s not illegal to eat nails, but that can kill you. It is not illegal to drink battery acid, but is that what is standing in your way?

It also seems counterintuitive that we would take healthy people who have never been in the shoes of the painfully, terminally ill. This is like a real-life fallacy of authority. When it comes down to it, there are many terminally ill people in the world and they’re not all above 18. The representatives in Belgium are so caught up on the length of time the patients have been in the world. They don’t think about their quality of life, or even how close they are to death.

When we think of age, we think of how many years it has been since the day we were born. However, what if we were able to know when we will die and we based our ages off of that? These children’s quality of life are extremely low, they’re very close to death, and they have healthy people telling them to deal with it. Age is merely a number, no matter your age, you can still feel the same pain as someone older than you.