This week is officially “Organ Donation Awareness Week” in Australia.

It was launched last Tuesday by Prime Minister, Mr Kevin Rudd, who said it is“crucial” that  families talk about this touchy issue.

A new program administered by the Federal Organ and Tissue Authority is to offer hospitals up to $11,400 a time for harvesting transplant organs from dying patients.

Mr Rudd lamented the fact that at present only 56 percent of Australian families give consent when approached for permission to remove a dying relative’s organs for transplant purposes.

His government is spending $150 million to try to boost that percentage.

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Why would families refuse to permit having their dying relatives harvested?

 *  do they doubt whether the doctors will wait until their loved one is really dead before starting to take things out?

 *  do they wonder whether “brain-death” is simply a convenient myth?

 *  do they wonder whether a person’s soul has necessarily left the body just because one organ — the brain — doesn’t look like working again?

Good questions.  The exact moment the soul departs cannot be known by scientific means.  Death is only certain when the body starts to decompose – which is why priests are permitted to give the Last Rites up to an hour after patients are certified medically dead.

By which time their organs are useless for transplanting.

Organs good enough to be worth transplanting must come from patients only pretend-dead — not dead-dead.

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The government’s new pro-organ-harvesting website assures us that “most religions, including all major religions, support organ and tissue donation and transplantation as acts of generosity and merit . . . .”

Could that be a fib?

Even on life-support — while heart and lungs function, albeit artificially assisted – does not the body remain one organism, with one being, one soul?

Does that mean that it is removing his/her organs which actually kills the donor-patient?

Is that murder?