Dead-Donor Rule
Definition
The ethical and legal principle that vital organs may only be retrieved from individuals who have already been declared legally dead. It ensures that organ procurement does not itself cause or constitute death.
- Type
- Ethical and legal principle
- Core requirement
- Legal death must be declared before vital organ retrieval
- Purpose
- Ensures procurement does not cause or constitute death
- Field
- Forensic and transplant medicine, death determination
- Related concept
- Brain death and circulatory death criteria used to satisfy it
Common questions
Why does the dead-donor rule matter in cases using circulatory death rather than brain death?+
Donation after circulatory death requires a defined observation period after the heart stops before organ retrieval begins, precisely so the declaration of death is genuinely irreversible and the retrieval itself cannot be argued to have caused the death.
Has the dead-donor rule been challenged in medical ethics debates?+
Yes, some ethicists argue the rule is more a social convention than a strict clinical necessity and propose consent-based alternatives, but it remains the operating legal and professional standard that transplant teams and forensic pathologists follow in practice.
Related terms
- Harvard Criteria (1968)
- The four-point diagnostic criteria for a permanently non-functioning brain published by the Harvard Ad Hoc Committee in JAMA: unreceptivity and unresponsivity, no...
- Molecular Death
- The progressive, tissue-by-tissue irreversible failure of cellular metabolism that follows somatic death. Different tissues undergo molecular death at different rates, ranging from...
- Somatic Death
- The irreversible cessation of vital functions of the organism as a whole: cardiac activity, respiratory activity, and integrated neurological function. The threshold...
- TOHTA 1994
- The Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Act 1994 (India), amended in 2011. Section 2(d) defines brain-stem death as the permanent and...
- Uniform Determination of Death Act 1981 (UDDA)
- US model legislation, drafted by the President's Commission, that provides two legally equivalent definitions of death: irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory...